The Dartmouth Review, a conservative weekly student newspaper funded by off-campus right-wing sources (see 1980), marks the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Nazi rampage through the Jewish communities of Germany in 1938, by depicting Dartmouth College president James Freedman as Adolf Hitler on its front cover. Freedman is Jewish. The article accuses him of searching for a “final solution” to the problem of conservatives at Dartmouth, a specific reference to the Holocaust. Many Dartmouth students and faculty members accuse the Review of overt anti-Semitism (see October 1982 and October 4, 1990). The Review will later apologize, not to Freedman, but to those who might have been offended. [Boston Globe, 10/5/1990; Dartmouth Free Press, 9/20/2006]

Two Democratic organizations in Ohio file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in the matter of the now-infamous “Willie Horton” ads used to great effect by the Bush re-election campaign (see June-September 1988 and September 21 - October 4, 1988). The complaint alleges that the ostensibly independent political organization that created and financed the first ad, the National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC), violated the law on independent expenditures (see May 1990 and After). The complaint uncovers numerous connections between NSPAC and the Bush campaign. However, the FEC refuses to charge the Bush campaign with campaign finance violations. [Inside Politics (.org), 1999]

African-American writer Anthony Walton writes for the New York Times Magazine his thoughts on the overtly racist “Willie Horton” ad campaign launched the year before by the Bush re-election campaign (see June-September 1988 and September 21 - October 4, 1988). Walton writes: “George Bush and his henchmen could not have invented Willie Horton. Horton, with his coal-black skin; huge, unkempt Afro, and a glare that would have given Bull Connor or Lester Maddox [infamous white supremacists who abused African-Americans in the 1950s and ‘60s] serious pause, had committed a brutal murder in 1974 and been sentenced to life in prison. Then, granted a weekend furlough from prison, had viciously raped a white woman in front of her fiance, who was also attacked. Willie Horton was the perfect symbol of what happened to innocent whites when liberals (read Democrats) were on the watch, at least in the gospel according to post-Goldwater Republicans. Horton himself, in just a fuzzy mug shot, gave even the stoutest, most open, liberal heart a shiver. Even me. I thought of all the late nights I had ridden in terror on the F and A trains, while living in New York City. I thought Willie Horton must be what the wolf packs I had often heard about, but never seen, must look like. I said to myself, ‘Something has got to be done about these n_ggers.’” Walton recounts several instances where he himself has been the victim of racism, and notes that in many eyes, he and Horton are interchangeable: “If Willie Horton would become just a little middle-class, he would look like me.… [I]n retrospect, I can see that racism has always been with me, even when I was shielded by love or money, or when I chose not to see it. But I saw it in the face of Willie Horton, and I can’t ignore it, because it is my face.” [New York Times Magazine, 8/20/1989]

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh admits to a Newsday reporter that he made two racially inflammatory remarks during his earlier radio days. He admits to telling a black caller, while doing a music radio show in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” He also admits to making a much more recent statement on his current broadcast, telling his listeners, “Have you ever noticed that all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble [black civil rights leader] Jesse Jackson?” Limbaugh tells the reporter that it would be wrong to conclude that he is racist because of those remarks, says he is “the least racist host you’ll ever find,” and says he feels guilty about the “bone in the nose” comment. [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 10/7/2009; Snopes (.com), 10/13/2009]

American radio undergoes a sea change. AM stations, formerly the leading radio broadcast medium, find themselves increasingly abandoned by their listeners, who prefer music broadcast over FM stations. Over 5,000 AM stations, facing bankruptcy and the prospect of closing down, turn to political talk radio broadcasts to attract listeners. By 1993, according to FCC chairman Reed Hundt, “one out of every seven dollars that broadcasters earned in radio” comes from talk radio. The first national “superstar” of talk radio is conservative host Rush Limbaugh, a former disc jockey and sports announcer. In upcoming years, hundreds of Limbaugh imitators will land lucrative national, regional, and local contracts, and conservative viewpoints will come to dominate American talk radio well into the next millennium. [Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 45]

The “astroturf” lobbying organization Citizens for a Sound Economy (see 1984 and After) founds a spinoff group, Citizens for the Environment. This group will quickly begin calling acid rain and other environmental problems “myths.” An investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette discovers that the organization has “no citizen membership of its own.” [New Yorker, 8/30/2010]

The Ohio Democratic party and a group called Black Elected Democrats of Ohio file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over the infamous “Willie Horton” campaign ad of 1988 (see September 21 - October 4, 1988), claiming that the “outside” organization that released the ad, the National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC), violated the law on independent expenditures, and that NSPAC functioned as an arm of the 1988 Bush presidential campaign. According to the complaint, it was legal for NSPAC to expend funds criticizing Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and supporting President Bush’s election only if the expenditures were independent and uncoordinated between the two organizations. Any spending that was made “in cooperation, consultation, or concert, with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate, his authorized political committees, or their agents,” represented an illegal “in-kind contribution” in excess of federal contribution limits. The FEC conducts an investigation into the relationship between NSPAC and the Bush campaign. The investigation uncovers several ties between the two organizations. For example, Larry McCarthy, the NSPAC media consultant who, as a top marketing expert for the NSPAC’s “Americans for Bush” organization, created the Horton ad, worked for top Bush campaign adviser Roger Ailes; McCarthy was a former senior vice president of Ailes Communications, Inc. (ACI), which functioned as the main media consulting firm for the Bush campaign. McCarthy tells investigators he worked at ACI until January 1987, but continued to work with ACI on “a contractual basis” until December 1987, when he began working as Senator Robert Dole (R-KS)‘s media consultant. McCarthy admits to having a number of contacts with Ailes during the Bush-Dukakis campaign, but says some of them were “of a passing social nature,” such as “running into one another in restaurants or at airports.” He denies discussing “anything relative to the Bush presidential campaign, NSPAC, or political matters.” McCarthy’s story is contradicted by Ailes, who tells the FEC that he had talked to McCarthy twice about opportunities to work for the Bush campaign, opportunities Ailes says McCarthy lost by working for NSPAC. The FEC also discovers that another former ACI employee, Jesse Raiford of Raiford Communications, worked on the Horton ad, and while doing so “simultaneously received compensation from NSPAC and the Bush campaign.” Raiford also “expended NSPAC funds for the production of the Willie Horton ad.” Though there is clear evidence of illegal connections and complicity between the Bush campaign and NSPAC, the FEC’s Board of Commissioners deadlock 3-3 on voting whether to bring formal charges against the two organizations. The swing vote, commissioner Thomas Josefiak, says the explanations from Ailes and McCarthy about their lack of substantive contacts during the campaign “were plausible and reasonably consistent.” Josefiak says both were guilty of “bad judgment” and may have acted “foolish[ly],” but did nothing warranting legal action. The FEC also determines that Raiford only “performed technical tasks” for the two organizations, “and played no role in any substantive or strategic decisions made by either organization.” The commissioners conclude that neither organization violated campaign finance law. [Inside Politics (.org), 1999]

The Dartmouth Review, a conservative weekly student newspaper funded by off-campus right-wing sources (see 1980), says that the deaths of 1,400 Muslim pilgrims and 7,000 Australian penguins are “equally tragic.” Three weeks later, the Review publishes what it calls “a heartfelt apology… to all the penguins of the world.” [Dartmouth Free Press, 9/20/2006]

Nine days after Iraq invades Kuwait (see August 2, 1990), the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton creates a front organization, “Citizens for a Free Kuwait,” almost entirely funded by Kuwaiti money. Hill & Knowlton’s point man with the Kuwaitis is Craig Fuller, a close friend and political adviser to President Bush (see July 23, 1986). Veteran PR reporter Jack O’Dwyer will later write, “Hill & Knowlton… has assumed a role in world affairs unprecedented for a PR firm.” [Christian Science Monitor, 9/6/2002; Public Relations Watch, 6/3/2007] Citizens for a Free Kuwait is one of about twenty PR and lobbying groups formed by the Kuwaiti government. Other American PR firms representing these groups include the Rendon Group and Neill & Co. Citizens for a Free Kuwait will spread a false story of Kuwaiti babies being killed in their incubators by Iraqi troops, a story that will help inflame US public opinion and win the Bush administration the authority to launch an assault against Iraq (see October 10, 1990). Another public relations and lobbying effort includes a 154-page book detailing supposed Iraqi atrocities, entitled The Rape of Kuwait, that is distributed to various media outlets and later featured on television talk shows and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The Kuwaiti embassy also buys 200,000 copies of the book for distribution to American troops. Hill & Knowlton will produce dozens of “video news releases” that are offered as “news stories” to television news broadcasters throughout America; the VNRs are shown on hundreds of US television news broadcasts, usually as straight news reports without being identified as the product of a public relations firm. [Public Relations Watch, 6/3/2007]

GOPAC logo. [Source: Mullings (.com)]A New York Times editorial derides a recent effort by a conservative political action committee to label political opponents with slanderous epithets. According to the editorial, GOPAC, the GOP Political Action Committee chaired by Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA), has issued a glossary mailed to Republican state legislative candidates urging them to use the following words to characterize their Democratic opponents: “sick,” “traitors,” “bizarre,” “self-serving,” “shallow,” “corrupt,” “pathetic,” and “shame.” GOPAC later “regretted” including the word “traitors” in that list of characterizations, the editorial reports, but has continued to back the use of the other epithets. The glossary is part of a pamphlet entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” and features a letter from Gingrich advising the candidates to step up the personal invective against their opponents because, he writes, vilification works. The Times writes: “Mr. Gingrich’s injunction represents the worst of American political discourse, which reached a low during the dispiriting presidential campaign of 1988 (see September 21 - October 4, 1988). Then, more than ever before, negative argument displaced reasoned discussion about how a nation might best be governed. The sound bite reigned. Attack commercials flourished. The signs this year aren’t any better. Evidence that negative campaigning can come back to sink the sender has had little impact. The races for governor in California and Texas have already seen the same slash and burn. No doubt the proceedings will grow more rabid still as November nears. Negative discourse serves democracy poorly. The temptation to avoid serious debate is already great. It increases as the stakes soar and slander becomes a rewarding, easy option. The issues of the day go untended. The whole affair takes on the character of the gladiator’s art. The GOPAC glossary may herald a descent into even lower levels of discourse. It comes blessed by a politician of some influence—the Republican whip in the House—and it is intended for candidates on the state level, many of them presumably running for the first time. Even though Mr. Gingrich himself may not have seen the list before it was mailed, this is a disturbing document. The nakedness of the GOPAC offering also makes it useful. There must be limits to the negative politics that voters will bear; the bald appeal to invective will certainly probe those limits. For now, it should be said that some adjectives in the glossary aptly describe the glossary itself: shallow, sensationalist, and, yes, shame(ful).” [New York Times, 9/20/1990; Propaganda Critic, 9/29/2002; Propaganda Critic, 9/29/2002] Later in the year, the pamphlet will win the Doublespeak Award from the National Conference of Teachers of English. [Propaganda Critic, 9/29/2002] Gingrich and GOPAC will expand upon the original pamphlet in 1995, after Gingrich becomes speaker of the House (see 1995).

Almost 2,500 protesters gather on the Dartmouth College green to protest the conservative, off-campus Dartmouth Review, a student newspaper given to extremes of racial and political rhetoric (see 1980). The protest is sparked by the Review’s recent publication of a selection of Nazi propaganda on Yom Kippur, one of the highest of Jewish holy days. The selection, printed on the paper’s masthead, was from Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, and read: “I therefore believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: By warding off the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord’s work.” The protest is led by Dartmouth president James Freedman, and made up of a wide swath of students, faculty, and alumni. “This has been a week of infamy for the Dartmouth community,” Freedman says. “The Dartmouth Review has consistently attacked blacks because they are black, women because they are women, homosexuals because they are homosexuals, and Jews because they are Jews,” he says; two years before, the Review had compared Freedman, who is Jewish, to Hitler, and compared his policies to the Holocaust (see November 9-10, 1988). College trustees call the Hitler publication “a criminal act of sabotage.” Trustee Accuses University President of Using Incident to 'Incite Hatred' - The Boston Globe describes Review trustee and former editor Dinesh D’Souza, a former policy adviser in the Reagan administration, as both “contrite and combative” over the incident. D’Souza apologizes for the publishing of the Hitler selection, then moments later accuses Freedman of using the incident to incite hatred against the Review. “This case is Dartmouth’s Tawana Brawley,” he says, referring to the 1987 case of a young African-American woman who some believe falsely accused several white men of raping her. “You have a sabotage, a hoax, a dirty trick that is being ruthlessly and cynically exploited by the college leadership in order to ruin the lives of many innocent students. President Freedman has emerged as the Al Sharpton of academia.” (Sharpton, a New York pastor and civil rights leader, was one of Brawley’s most public advocates.) Protesters line up one after another to urge the college to repudiate the newspaper. Dartmouth officials say that the newspaper has damaged the college’s reputation and diminished the school’s ability to recruit top students and faculty, particularly minorities. Religion professor Arthur Hertzberg calls the Hitler quote another “act of ongoing hooliganism” in a string of politically and racially explosive actions by the Review, and tells the crowd: “This is not a hating college. This is not an anti-Semitic college. This is not an institution of infamy. It is a community of warmth and love.” Professor: Responsibility Lies with Conservative Funders - Hertzberg says his quarrel is not with “the 20 or 30 misguided young people who edit the Review.” Rather, he says, it is with the prominent conservatives who support the paper. The Review is financed mostly by off-campus, conservative organizations and foundations; it has an annual budget of some $150,000, and faces high legal bills. Hertzberg says the paper’s key backers include former Treasury Secretary William Simon; former Chase Manhattan Bank chairman George Champion; National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr.; and conservative commentator and former Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan. “My quarrel is with those out there who put up hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with which to contaminate this campus,” Hertzberg says. “They should be ashamed of themselves.” Board Member Accuses Liberals of Planting Hitler Quote - Review advisory board member George Gilder, a conservative economist, says the Hitler quote was planted by someone who wishes the newspaper ill: “Do you think any conservative in the world would deliberately put that into the magazine? It’s obviously an attack by somebody who infiltrated the ranks.” Gilder says Freedman and liberals at Dartmouth are using the Hitler incident “to try to kill the Review, just as they try to kill conservatism whenever it rises up on campus.” Editor in chief Kevin Pritchett collects the issues of the newspaper, and, with three other senior staffers, publishes an open letter denying any involvement in publishing the quote and accusing a staff “insider” of somehow inserting it. Review supporters in New York and Washington, DC, demand that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) conduct an investigation to find the “saboteur,” and Review adviser Jeffrey Hart releases a written response that attacks Freedman for falsely accusing the Review of racism (see March 15, 1982, 1983, and August 2002) and intolerance (see 1981, 1984, 1985, and July 1990). [Boston Globe, 10/5/1990; Dartmouth Free Press, 9/20/2006] Days later, Simon publishes an editorial in the New York Times decrying the Review’s reference to Hitler, but calling the publication of the quote “sabotage” and saying: “[s]omeone secretly gained access to the production process.… Since the slur was deviously implanted in a section that remains unchanged from week to week, the subterfuge eluded the proofreaders.” He describes Pritchett as “horrified” by the incident, says that any accusations of anti-Semitism on the Review’s part are “preposterous,” and accuses Freedman of orchestrating a protest against the Review “that quickly metamorphosed into an instrument of hate—hate directed against student journalists who, as a result, suffered death warnings, threats of violence, as well as mean-spirited accusations.” The Review serves to “question, challenge, and even deride the dominant liberal orthodoxy on the campus, exposing its hypocrisies,” Simon writes, and calls any attempt to call the Review to account “political opportunism.” [New York Times, 10/20/1990]Investigation Finds Quote Included by Staff, Editors - The ADL will indeed conduct an investigation, and will find that the Hitler quote was from a well-thumbed book in the Review’s office. It will conclude that a Review staffer had inserted the quote with the knowledge and apparent complicity of the senior editors. The ADL will call the publication of the quote “obviously an anti-Semitic act,” and write, “Prior acts of the Review and the past conduct of its members have contributed, the commission believes, to the creation of an environment which condoned and even encouraged a member of the Review to include the offensive Hitler quote.” The investigation notes that the Review has frequently published other offensive comments such as “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” and “genocide means never having to say you’re sorry.” History of Anti-Semitism - The Review has a history of anti-Semitic publishings (see October 1982 and November 9-10, 1988). D’Souza says Review trustees have repudiated such actions, which he calls the work of unpolished and overzealous staffers who sometimes run the Review like “a half-baked, ramshackle student paper.” Review President, Contributors Resign over Furor - C. Tyler White, president of the Review, will soon resign in protest. “I cannot allow the Review to ruin my life any further,” he will write. “The official Review response, which I co-signed and helped distribute, avoids the main thrust of the issue. It does not emphasize our sorrow in this dreadful act of malice, nor does it claim responsibility for letting it reach newsprint.… The editor in chief has failed in his job, and now we must wear the albatross of anti-Semitism because he won’t take responsibility for the issue’s contents.” Review contributors David Budd and Pang-Chun Chen resign along with White, writing, “We are conservatives, but we are not Nazis.” Budd writes that the Review’s apology implied “let’s put the blame on someone else.” Congressional Involvement - US Representative Chester Atkins (D-MA) delivers a letter concerning the incident to Freedman, accusing the Review of “fomenting hatred and intolerance.” The letter is signed by 84 of Atkins’s fellow Congress members. Atkins is running for re-election against a Review board member, John MacGovern. Atkins says MacGovern should step down as a board member; MacGovern refuses, saying the Review’s senior editors are not responsible for the Hitler quote. [Boston Globe, 10/5/1990; Dartmouth Free Press, 9/20/2006]

’Nayirah’ testifying before Congress. [Source: Web Fairy (.com)]An unconfirmed report of Iraqi soldiers entering a Kuwaiti hospital during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (see August 2, 1990) and removing newborns from their incubators causes a sensation in the US media. The rumor, which later turns out to be false, is seized upon by senior executives of the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which has a $11.9 million contract from the Kuwaiti royal family to win support for a US-led intervention against Iraq—the largest foreign-funded campaign ever mounted to shape US public opinion. (Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the firm should have been held accountable for its marketing campaign, but the Justice Department fails to intervene.) The firm also has close ties to the Bush administration, and will assist in marketing the war to the US citizenry. [Christian Science Monitor, 9/6/2002; Independent, 10/19/2003; Public Relations Watch, 6/3/2007] Hill & Knowlton uses a front group, “Citizens for a Free Kuwait” (see August 11, 1990), to plant the stories in the news media. Congressional Hearings - Hearings on the story, and other tales of Iraqi atrocities, are convened by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, chaired by Representatives Tom Lantos (D-CA) and John Porter (R-IL). Reporters John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton will later characterize the caucus as little more than an H&K-funded sham; Lantos and Porter are also co-chairs of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a legally separate entity that occupied free office space in Hill & Knowlton’s Washington, DC offices. The star of the hearings is a slender, 15-year old Kuwaiti girl called “Nayirah.” According to the Caucus, her true identity is being concealed to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her or her family. Sobbing throughout her testimony, “Nayirah” describes what she says she witnessed in a hospital in Kuwait City; her written testimony is provided to reporters and Congressmen in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait. “I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital,” she tells the assemblage. “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where… babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.” [Christian Science Monitor, 9/6/2002; Los Angeles Times, 1/5/2003; Public Relations Watch, 6/3/2007] The hearings, and particularly “Nayirah’s” emotional tale, inflame American public opinion against the Iraqis (see October 10, 1990 and After) and help drum up support for a US invasion of Iraq (see January 9-13, 1991). Outright Lies - Neither Lantos, Porter, nor H&K officials tell Congress that the entire testimony is a lie. “Nayirah” is the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. Neither do they reveal that “Nayirah’s” testimony was coached by H&K vice president Lauri Fitz-Pegado. Seven other “witnesses” testify to the same atrocities before the United Nations; the seven use false names and identities. The US even presents a video made by Hill & Knowlton to the Security Council. No journalist investigates the claims. As author Susan Trento will write: “The diplomats, the congressmen, and the senators wanted something to support their positions. The media wanted visual, interesting stories.” It is not until after the war that human rights investigators look into the charges. No other witnesses can be located to confirm “Nayirah’s” story. Dr. Mohammed Matar, director of Kuwait’s primary care system, and his wife, Dr. Fayeza Youssef, who runs the obstretrics unit at the maternity hospital, says that at the time of the so-called atrocities, few if any babies were in incubator units—and Kuwait only possesses a few such units anyway. “I think it was just something for propaganda,” Dr. Matar will say. It is doubtful that “Nayirah” was even in the country at the time, as the Kuwaiti aristocracy had fled the country weeks before the Iraqi invasion. Amnesty International, which had supported the story, will issue a retraction. Porter will claim that he had no knowledge that the sobbing little girl was a well-rehearsed fabricator, much less an ambassador’s daughter. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporters will ask al-Sabah for permission to question his daughter about her testimony; he will angrily refuse. “Naiyrah” herself will later admit that she had never been in the hospital herself, but had learned of the supposed baby murders from a friend. In a subsequent interview about media manipulation during the war, Fitz-Pegado will say: “Come on.… Who gives a sh_t whether there were six babies or two? I believed her.” She will later clarify that statement: “What I meant was one baby would be too many.” [CounterPunch, 12/28/2002; Independent, 10/19/2003; Public Relations Watch, 6/3/2007]

The British MI6 establishes Operation Mass Appeal, a British intelligence mission designed to exaggerate the threat of Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in order to shape public opinion. [BBC, 11/21/2003] The operation plants stories in the domestic and foreign media from the 1990s through 2003. Intelligence used by Mass Appeal is said to be “single source data of dubious quality.” After the First Gulf War, the operation seeks to justify the UN sanctions policy. But after the September 11 attacks, its objective is to secure public support for an invasion of Iraq. The mission is similar to Operation Rockingham (see 1991-March 2003), another British intelligence disinformation program. [New Yorker, 3/31/2003; BBC, 11/21/2003; Press Association (London), 11/21/2003; Sunday Times (London), 12/28/2003] Former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter says in late in 2003 (see November 21, 2003) that he supplied Mass Appeal with intelligence while serving as UN chief weapons inspector from the summer of 1997 until August 1998 and that he met with British agents involved in the operation several times in both New York and London. [BBC, 11/21/2003]

President George H. W. Bush signs a covert “lethal finding” authorizing the CIA to spend a hundred million dollars to “create the conditions for removal of Saddam Hussein from power.” [New Yorker, 6/7/2004] The CIA forms the Iraqi Opposition Group within its Directorate of Operations to implement this policy. [Ritter, 2005, pp. 128] Awash in cash, the agency hires the Rendon Group to influence global political opinion on matters related to Iraq. According to Francis Brooke, an employee of the company who’s paid $22,000 per month, the Rendon Group’s contract with the CIA provides it with a ten percent “management fee” on top of whatever money it spends. “We tried to burn through $40 million a year,” Brooke will tell the New Yorker. “It was a very nice job.” The work involves planting false stories in the foreign press. The company begins supplying British journalists with misinformation which then shows up in the London press. In some cases, these stories are later picked up by the American press, in violation of laws prohibiting domestic propaganda. “It was amazing how well it worked. It was like magic,” Brooke later recalls. Another one of the company’s tasks is to help the CIA create a viable and unified opposition movement against Saddam Hussein (see June 1992). This brings the Rendon Group and Francis Brooke into contact with Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi (see After May 1991). The CIA will soon help Chalabi and Rendon create the Iraqi National Congress (INC) to further the goal of toppling Hussein. [New Yorker, 6/7/2004] Author and intelligence expert James Bamford will later say, “Chalabi was a creature of American propaganda to a large degree. It was an American company, the Rendon Group, that—working secretly with the CIA—basically created his organization, the Iraqi National Congress. And put Chalabi in charge basically.… From the very beginning Chalabi was paid a lot of money from the US taxpayers. The CIA paid him originally about 350,000 dollars a month, to Chalabi and his organization.” [PBS, 4/25/2007]

During the Republican National Convention, Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA) challenges the Democratic Party’s claims to embrace the values of the family. In a speech to the party faithful, Gingrich derides the Democrats’ claim that “governments don’t raise children, people do,” and says: “If they had tried to use the words ‘families raise children’ in Madison Square Garden [which hosted the Democratic National Convention days before], half their party would have rebelled and they would have had a bloody fight. So they tried to finesse it, to sound conservative without being conservative.” Gingrich gives the following example of what he calls Democratic “family values”: “Woody Allen having non-incest with a non-daughter to whom he was a non-father because they were a non-family fits the Democratic platform perfectly.” [Media Research Center, 3/12/1998; ABC News, 3/9/2007] (Gingrich is referring to film director and comedian Woody Allen’s affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former lover Mia Farrow. Previn was of the age of consent when she and Allen began their affair, though Allen had served as Previn’s putative stepfather and many perceive the relationship as incestuous; they will eventually marry.) [Time, 8/31/1992; CNN, 12/24/1997] The Washington Post’s David Broder calls Gingrich’s charges “feeble,” and Newsday writes, “For spewing the weekend’s best non sequitur, Trash Watch nominates Newt for the Hall of Surly Surrogates.” Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton (D-AK) says that Gingrich’s remark is “off the wall and out of line,” and says Gingrich “has no shame.” [Media Research Center, 3/12/1998]

During the Republican National Convention, Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Rich Bond, in speaking about Democrats, says that “we are America, they are not America.” [Hunt, 9/1/2009, pp. 21]

Radio personality Rush Limbaugh hosts his own late-night television show; Roger Ailes, the Republican campaign consultant (see 1968, January 25, 1988, and September 21 - October 4, 1988), is his executive producer. On this show, Limbaugh gives his response to African-American filmmaker Spike Lee’s recommendation that African-American children be allowed to skip school to watch his biographical docudrama Malcolm X: “Spike, if you’re going to do that, let’s complete the education experience. You should tell them that they should loot the theater and then blow it up on their way out.” [Media Matters, 10/27/2009] Ailes will go on to found Fox News (see October 7, 1996).

On the eve of the election victory by presidential candidate Bill Clinton (D-AR), the Wall Street Journal publishes an op-ed titled “Dracula Liberalism,” which sardonically portrays liberals as vampires and Clinton as their prey. “The Clinton campaign, if you choose to believe, has driven a stake through the heart of American liberalism,” it writes. But the “dead” liberals may yet rise: “Like [famed actor] Bela Lugosi, the liberals possess great, destructive strength. They have the power of hypnosis.… (Has anyone checked the necks recently of [Supreme Court] Justices [David] Souter and [Anthony] Kennedy?)” If Clinton wins the presidency, the Journal writes, “the liberal undead would produce a great many fitful pre-dawn hours for a young President Clinton.… [I]f Bill Clinton wins, don’t bother to fax your congratulations to the White House. Send cloves of garlic instead.” [Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 61] Editorialist Otis Pike will write two days later that the Journal editorial concluded “what has seemed a daily barrage predicting a dreadful fate for the nation under a Clinton presidency,” even though the Journal’s own reporters were simultaneously running stories with headlines such as “Post-Election Investment Environment Is Seen as Little Changed by Who Wins.” [Newhouse News Service, 11/4/1992]

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, in his book See, I Told You So, argues that Republicans cannot depend on a negative, anti-liberal frame in which to draw their arguments. “We are not a party of people connected together by bonds of negativity,” he writes. “We are a party of ideas—positive ideas.” He lists some of what he considers the guiding principles of Republican thought: “We must perceive and sell ourselves: Not as the party that opposes government, but that which champions individual freedoms; Not as the party that opposes higher taxes, but that which champions entrepeneurship; Not as the party that opposes abortion, but that which champions every form of human life as the most sacred of God’s creatures; Not as the party that opposes the expansion of the welfare state, but that which champions rugged individualism.” [Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 59-60]

Radio personality Rush Limbaugh hosts his own late-night television show; Roger Ailes, the Republican campaign consultant (see 1968, January 25, 1988, and September 21 - October 4, 1988), is Limbaugh’s executive producer. On this show, Limbaugh notes a recent comment of Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC), who told a gay solder that his lifestyle was “not normal” and advised the soldier to get psychiatric help. Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on an explicitly racist, segregationist third-party platform and who led the “Dixiecrat” exodus of Southern racists out of the Democratic Party (see March 12, 1956 and After), is praised by Limbaugh. The commentator says of Thurmond: “He is not encumbered by trying to be politically correct. He’s not encumbered by all of the—the so-called new niceties and proprieties. He just says it, and if you want to know what America used to be—and a lot of people wish it still were—then you listen to Strom Thurmond.… He got a standing ovation. Now people—people applauded that. People applaud—because—you know, Strom Thurmond can say it because he’s 90 years old and people say: ‘Ah, he’s just an old coot. He’s from the old days,’ and so forth. But that’s what most people think. They just don’t have the guts to say it. That’s why they applaud when somebody does say it that directly and that simply.” [Media Matters, 10/27/2009] Ailes will go on to found Fox News (see October 7, 1996).

As the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue (OR—see 1986) prepares to launch a wave of protests during its summer “Cities of Refuge” offensive (see July 9-19, 1993), the Orlando Sentinel publishes an extensive examination of the organization, titled “Inside Operation Rescue.” The article examines the large number of protesters who have just graduated from the Institute of Mobilized Prophetic Activated Christian Training (IMPACT), a 12-week “boot camp” aimed at giving protesters intensive training in protest and harassment tactics against abortion clinics, medical personnel, and clients. Tactics Glean Information, Gain Access, Enable Harassment and 'Sidewalk Counseling' - Some tactics, the article notes, are familiar to private detectives: “[t]rack down license plate numbers to obtain addresses of clinic employees, then follow them to supermarkets, hotels, and other public places where they can be confronted. Snap photographs. Run video cameras. Find Social Security numbers and check financial records. Infiltrate clinics by posing as patients. Befriend a clinic worker’s son, then preach to him about the sins of his mother. Dig up dirt through court and other government records. File as many lawsuits as possible.” Lawyers and private detectives explained to the IMPACT members how far they could push the freedom of speech and privacy laws in order to successfully harass and intimidate medical personnel and clients, including the use of sophisticated surveillance equipment, of toxic chemicals to be sprayed into clinics, and of bomb threats and death threats left on home and clinic answering machines. (OR officially denies using such tactics.) The graduates learned the techniques of “sidewalk counseling,” which involves targeting pregnant women and “counseling” them not to have abortions, using dolls and photographs of aborted fetuses when necessary. They learned how to use their own children to shield them from police officers, sometimes even pushing the children into police cordons to be arrested. Others learned how to masquerade as women seeking pregnancy counseling in order to gain access to the clinics, and how to disrupt operations once inside the clinic; these women are called “truth team” members. Some were trained to befriend pregnant women or their family members, and use information gleaned from the encounters to target them at their homes or places of work. Some even learned a technique they call “invoking a curse” on recalcitrant pregnant women or medical personnel, a technique one OR member calls the “save ‘em or slay ‘em” tactic.” (One pro-choice activist tells reporter Sarah Tippit, “I’ve had these people stand in my face and scream at the top of their lungs, ‘I pray for your death in the name of God, in the name of Jesus.’” 'FemiNazis' and 'Human Pesticides' - The group’s rhetoric includes labeling birth control pills “human pesticides,” and calling women who support abortion choices “femi-Nazis,” “lesbians who want to deny the true role of women,” and “Aryan supremacists” who fear that poor minorities will someday overrun them. One woman explains to a reporter how Christian women practice birth control: “God will open and close your womb” as necessary. Practicing Techniques on Florida Clinic - OR calls the training “preparation for spiritual warfare.” Florida resident Meredith Raney, an IMPACT graduate, says, “Anything we can learn and use to embarrass or encourage anyone, especially doctors, to stop working, we’ll use it.” The Melbourne, Florida, Aware Woman Clinic for Choice is targeted for “practice” protests by IMPACT graduates readying for the summer offensive. The protesters jam the telephones of the clinic with thousands of phone calls designed to keep potential clients from contacting the clinic, and swarm the clinic on a daily basis. In response, the clinic and pro-choice groups assemble a group of defenders—bikers, off-duty police officers, and volunteers whose responsibility is to keep the protesters from invading the clinic or blocking traffic to and from it. A surveillance video camera and microphone record the events taking place in the parking lot and on the sidewalks around the clinic. On the day Tippit covers the protest at Aware, many of the techniques are in effect, including “sidewalk counseling,” harassment and challenging of clients (some of whom have removed the license plates from their cars, or walk through the crowds of protesters brandishing baseball bats or stun guns), and pushing children into the arms of police officers to be arrested. [Orlando Sentinel, 6/6/1993]OR Leader Tells of Training - In a February 1993 interview conducted for the anti-abortion publication The Forerunner, OR leader Keith Tucci told of the two months of training his organization was holding for the event, which, according to the interview, is “not just to block abortion clinics, but to also influence every facet of society in ridding our nation of legalized child killing.” Interviewer Jay Rogers, referring to the 1991 Wichita blockade, asked, “So instead of having one Wichita, there will be six?” and Tucci responded, “Exactly.” Tucci said that participants would be taught “everything from ‘spiritual warfare’ to ‘How to use the media before they use you.’” He went on to say that OR’s intent was to dissuade communities from allowing abortions to be practiced within their limits, and asked: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the politicians let abortion be legal, but there wasn’t a community in the country who would let an abortionist practice?… We’ve got to make it intolerable and only then will we make it illegal.” [The Forerunner, 2/1993]

Betsy McCaughey. [Source: Newsday / Gawker (.com)]Elizabeth “Betsy” McCaughey (R-NY), a lawyer and future lieutenant governor of New York, writes a scathing analysis of the Clinton administration’s health care reform plan. The article, “No Exit,” is published in the New Republic, and sparks not only a detailed rebuttal from the Clinton administration, but numerous editorials and responses praising the article and joining in the attack. Echoing McCaughey’s arguments, Newsweek writes, “The plan would reduce the quantity and quality of health care and medical technologies by vastly expanding government’s coercive role.” McCaughey and Newsweek question the proposed creation of a seven-member “National Health Board” which will, she claims, “guess the nation’s health care needs and decree how much the nation may spend meeting them.” According to Newsweek: “Everyone would be locked into one system of low-budget health plans picked by the government. Fifteen presidential appointees, the National Quality Management Council, not you and your doctor, would define the ‘medically necessary’ and ‘appropriate’ care a doctor could give you. Escaping government control to choose your doctor or buy other care would be virtually impossible. Doctors could be paid only by the government-approved plans, at rates set by the government. It would be illegal for doctors to accept money directly from patients, and there would be 15-year jail terms for people driven to bribery for care they feel they need but the government does not deem ‘necessary.’ Government would define a minimum level of care and herd people in particular regions into dependence on the lowest-cost organization able to deliver that level. Doctors would be driven into organizations in which they would be punished financially for giving more treatment than the organizations’ budget targets permit. The primary care physician assigned to you would be, McCaughey notes, a gatekeeper with an incentive to limit your access to specialists and high-tech medicine. The premise of the Clintons’ plan is not just that government knows best, but that government knows everything relevant, including how many specialists there should be no more than 45 percent of all doctors [sic]. McCaughey says many medical students will be told that the specialties they prefer are closed, or closed to them because they are not the right race or ethnicity. Yes, the plan subordinates medical values to ‘diversity.’” Prescription drug prices would be controlled through the Department of Health and Human Services, and, McCaughey and Newsweek claim, would “certainly suppress research” that might benefit patients of incurable diseases and disorders. [Newsweek, 2/7/1994]Refuting McCaughey - The Clinton administration details the “numerous factual inaccuracies and misleading statements” contained in McCaughey’s article. The administration’s response says that doctors and patients, not “government bureaucrats” or a board of governors, will decide what treatments are “necessary and appropriate.” The government will not decide what treatments are, and are not, provided: “If anything, the ‘necessary and appropriate’ care provision in the bill delegates authority to the medical profession—rather than imposing further government bureaucracy between the patient and the doctor.” The plan will not block Americans from opting into private health care plans just as they do now, nor will it block doctors and hospitals from accepting payments from “non-approved” health care plans. Nor does the plan require doctors and hospitals “to report your visit to a national data bank containing the medical histories of all Americans,” as McCaughey writes. And the so-called “National Health Board” will not “decide how much the nation can spend on health care beginning in 1996,” as McCaughey claims. The plan will not seek to reduce quality of care in the interest of saving money, and it does not contain price controls. [White House, 1/31/1994] A year later, author and columnist James Fallows will call the article “a triumph of misinformation,” and refutes McCaughey’s (and others’) claims point by point. [Atlantic Monthly, 1/1995]Instrumental in Derailing Reform - The article will later be cited by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) as “the first decisive breaking point” in the plan’s initial support; the plan will never be implemented. The article itself will spark tremendous controversy, winning the National Magazine Award while being attacked for being fundamentally inaccurate. (In 2006, the new editor of the New Republic, Franklin Foer, will apologize for his magazine having run the article.) In 2009 McCaughey will be a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and will soon join the equally conservative Hudson Institute. Both are heavily funded by health care corporations. [Daily Beast, 5/15/2009]

The Media Access Project (MAP), a telecommunications law firm, defends the now-expired Fairness Doctrine in a Washington Post editorial. The editorial reads in part: “The Supreme Court unanimously found [the Fairness Doctrine] advances First Amendment values (see June 9, 1969). It safeguards the public’s right to be informed on issues affecting our democracy, while also balancing broadcasters’ rights to the broadest possible editorial discretion.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 2/12/2005]

The extremist Army of God anti-abortion organization (AOG—see 1982) issues what it terms a “Second Defensive Action Statement” on behalf of Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion provider and his bodyguard a month before (see July 29, 1994). The first “Defensive Action Statement” was written by Hill in support of another anti-abortion murderer (see July 1993). The statement, signed by over a dozen anti-abortion activists, reads: “We the undersigned, declare the justice of taking all godly action necessary, including the use of force, to defend innocent human life (born and unborn). We proclaim that whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child. We declare and affirm that if in fact Paul Hill did kill or wound abortionist John Britton, and accomplices James Barrett and Mrs. Barrett, his actions are morally justified if they were necessary for the purpose of defending innocent human life. Under these conditions, Paul Hill should be acquitted of all charges against him.” [Army of God, 8/1994]

In January 2001, Michael Bray poses with the ‘Gas Can’ Award given to him by the Army of God for his advocacy of violence against abortion clinics. [Source: Ms. Magazine]Michael Bray, a radical anti-abortion activist and convicted clinic bomber, publishes A Time to Kill, a book giving religious justification for the murder of abortion providers and their staff members. [Kushner, 2003, pp. 39] The book maintains that there is a “biblical mandate” for the use of “deadly, godly force to protect the unborn.” [Ms. Magazine, 12/2002]

Tony Evans, the chaplain for the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team, speaks to a crowd of some 45,000 people in Texas Stadium as part of a Promise Keepers rally. The Promise Keepers is a right-wing Christian organization dedicated to “taking back” the supreme role of men in the family. Evans receives a storm of cheering and applause when he tells the crowd, “It’s been too long that three percent of homosexuals control our moral majority.” [On the Issues, 4/1995; Feminist Women's Health Center News, 2010]

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) links Democrats to Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who murdered her two children in 1991 and attempted to blame the killings on an unnamed black male. “I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things,” he says. “The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Referring to the upcoming midterm elections, Gingrich says, “That’s the message for the last three days.” Asked if Republicans being voted into office would stop such crimes from being committed, Gingrich says: “Yes. In my judgment, there’s no question.” Investigators learned that Smith was repeatedly brutalized and raped by her stepfather, Beverly Russell, a South Carolina Republican leader and local organizer for the Christian Coalition; Russell was still abusing Smith just two months before she murdered her children. [AlterNet (.org), 4/26/2000; ABC News, 3/9/2007]

An ad for Fox News by the news organization’s parent company, News Corporation. [Source: Huffington Post]Fox News registers the slogan “fair and balanced” as a trademark for its news and opinion broadcasts. In 2008, authors Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella will note that conservative-slanted Fox News (see October 7, 1996 and December 20, 2004) lives up, in a sense, to its promise of “fair and balanced” news and opinion by “simply inviting liberal guests—not by ensuring that their ideas will receive compatible time.” They will note, “The notion of different amounts of access is important, because we know that in highly controlled settings, mere exposure to signs and symbols produces a preference for them.” Fox disproportionately exposes its audience to conservative messages and arguments more than moderate or liberal ones. As a result, the authors observe, “[a]n audience that gravitates primarily to conservative sources whose message is consistent and repetitive is more susceptible to alternate points of view in approximately equal amounts.” The authors will continue, “Fox’s claim that Fox is unbiased because it is ‘fair and balanced’ is made with a wink and a nod.” They will quote conservative editorialist Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal (see January 20, 2003) and conservative financier Richard Viguerie (see July 2004) to bolster their argument. [CBS News, 8/12/2003; Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 49]

House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) expands on his 1990 pamphlet advising Republican candidates for office to characterize their opponents as “sick” “traitors” (see September 20, 1990). His political action committee, GOPAC, in a package given to freshmen House and Senate Republicans, includes a video, “We Are a Majority,” and an accompanying memo written by Gingrich that avows the committee is working to fulfill the requests of candidates across the country, who, according to the memo, have flooded its offices with “plaintive plea[s]” of “I wish I could speak like Newt.” The memo responds: “That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.” The memo advises candidates to “[r]ead them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used.” The list is divided into two parts: “Optimistic positive governing words and phrases to help describe your vision for the future of your community” and “Contrasting words to help you clearly define the policies and record of your opponent and the Democratic Party.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 2/1995; Information Clearinghouse, 1996] Communications professor Margaret Zulick will later call the package “a rudimentary rhetorical handbook, providing inexperienced political speakers with a lexicon of terms that drive a wedge of distinctions between themselves and members of the opposing party. At the same time it educates them in a common language that will give evidence of their solidarity with the speaker of the House and his goals for the Republican majority.” [Zulick, 2010]"Optimistic Positive Governing Words - The memo states: “Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!” The words include: activist; building; candid(ly); care(ing); challenge; change; children; choice/choose; citizen; commitment; common sense; compete; confident; conflict; control; courage; crusade; debate; dream; duty; eliminate good time in prison; empower(ment); fair; family; freedom; hard work; help; humane; incentive; initiative; lead; learn; legacy; liberty; light; listen; mobilize; moral; movement; opportunity; passionate; peace; pioneer; precious; premise; preserve; principle(d); pristine; pro- (issue): flag, children, environment, reform; prosperity; protect; proud/pride; provide; reform; rights; share; strength; success; tough; truth; unique; vision; and we/us/our. Contrasting Words - The memo states: “Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals, and their party.” The words include: abuse of power; anti- (issue); flag, family, child, jobs; betray; bizarre; bosses; bureaucracy; cheat; coercion; “compassion” is not enough; collapse(ing); consequences; corrupt; corruption; criminal rights; crisis; cynicism; decay; deeper; destroy; destructive; devour; disgrace; endanger; excuses; failure (fail); greed; hypocrisy; ideological; impose; incompetent; insecure; insensitive; intolerant; liberal; lie; limit(s); machine; mandate(s); obsolete; pathetic; patronage; permissive; attitude; pessimistic; punish; (poor…); radical; red tape; self-serving; selfish; sensationalists; shallow; shame; sick; spend(ing); stagnation; status quo; steal; taxes; they/them; threaten; traitors; unionized; urgent(cy); waste; welfare. [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 2/1995; Information Clearinghouse, 1996]

Bill Bright, who leads the Campus Crusade for Christ, says: “Arrogantly demanding their rights, activist gays and lesbians have become a militant voice in American politics, influencing elections and affecting the policies of high government leaders. Their public demonstrations and political lobbying have fooled many in our country into believing that they deserve special status.” [Political Research Associates, 12/1998 ; Feminist Women's Health Center News, 2010]

The American Coalition of Life Activists (ACLA), an organization of anti-abortion advocates who called the 1993 murder of an abortion doctor “justifiable” (see March 10, 1993 and July 1993), launches a campaign it calls the “Deadly Dozen.” The ACLA releases Old West-style “unwanted” posters of 13 prominent abortion providers. Many of the posters include the providers’ work and home addresses. The targeted doctors say they are very aware that similar posters created by other anti-abortion organizations had preceded the murders of three of their colleagues, and call the campaign a “hit list.” The FBI offers protection to the 13 providers, and many of them begin wearing bulletproof vests and taking other security precautions. After the ACLA is named in a lawsuit to prevent it from publishing the material (see 1996), ACLA leaders give some of the “Deadly Dozen” data to Neal Horsley of Carrollton, Georgia, who posts the material on his “Nuremberg Files” Web site (see January 1997). The Web site names doctors and abortion rights supporters and calls for them to be tried for “crimes against humanity.” In later years, when an abortion provider is murdered, their name will appear on the site with a line through it. Horsley uses gray tape for the names of abortion providers or staff who have been wounded. The entire Web site is designed to look as if it is dripping in blood. [Ms. Magazine, 12/2002]

Anti-abortion activist and alleged murderer John Salvi (see December 30, 1994 and After) receives an outpouring of support from a small group of fellow anti-abortion protesters. In December 1994, Salvi killed two women in Massachusetts clinics, and attempted to kill more at the Hillcrest Clinic in Norfolk, near where he is being held in jail. The activists and protesters gather near the jail to mount a rally of support. Anti-abortion leader Donald Spitz, a local pastor and a leader of the violent Army of God movement (see 1982), leads a “prayer vigil” outside of the prison. Through a bullhorn, Spitz shouts: “Thank you for saving innocent babies from being put to death. John Salvi, we care about you. We love you. We support you.” The Boston Globe notes that the Norfolk area is home to many anti-abortion protesters and organizations, and writes that it is an “area where televangelist Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network are considered mainstream.” Spitz, the head of Pro-Life Virginia, acknowledges that he and his group have picketed the Hillcrest Clinic for years, and tells reporters, “If John Salvi committed his deeds with the intent of saving innocent human babies from being put to death, his deeds were justified.” Spitz, who does not inform reporters of his connection with the Army of God, and other protesters carry signs that term Salvi a “prisoner of war.” Another protester, Ed Hyatt, calls Salvi a “hero” for killing abortion providers, and says Salvi is comparable to other “heroes” such as Michael Griffin (see March 10, 1993) and Paul Hill (see July 29, 1994). “Why is the life of a receptionist worth more than the lives of 50 innocent babies?” Spitz asks. “I don’t know why all the focus is on two receptionists when every day thousands of babies are being killed.” Kate Michelman of the National and Reproductive Rights Action League says that the Hillcrest staff has been subjected to “intense harassment and intimidation for many years… it’s a hotbed” of anti-abortion activity. The clinic has been bombed, invaded, set on fire, blockaded, and picketed. Spitz has identified at least one clinic doctor as a “war criminal” in over 800 posters he mailed to fellow doctors and neighbors. Anti-abortion leader David Crane tells reporters: “John Salvi was acting in defense of innocent life. He was willing to pay the ultimate price to stop legalized killing.” [Boston Globe, 1/2/1995; Extremist Groups: Information for Students, 1/1/2006]

Patricia Schroeder. [Source: Politico]Patricia Schroeder (D-CO) mocks statements by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) about why women should not serve in combat. While teaching a history class at Reinhardt College in Georgia in early January, Gingrich explained why women are unfit for combat duty, saying: “If combat means being in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don’t have upper body strength.” Men, on the other hand, “are basically little piglets; you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it.” Instead, Gingrich told his students, females might be well suited for manning the fire control computers on Navy ships. If being in combat, he said, “means being on an Aegis class cruiser managing the computer controls for 12 ships and their rockets, a female again may be dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.” Schroeder, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, reads Gingrich’s statements aloud on the floor of the House and says she is “very, very troubled by the new factual data that seems to be coming out of our new leader.” Schroeder says she never knew that women get infections every 30 days. She says she has seen male relatives in ditches, “but they don’t roll around like little piggies.” If men have trouble sitting in chairs, she adds, it might be hard for Gingrich to be speaker, “because you got to sit in a chair a lot.” She says she has been “working in a male culture for a very long time, and I haven’t met the first one who wants to go out and hunt a giraffe.” [New York Times, 1/18/1995]

The Alfred P. Murrah Building after being bombed. [Source: CBS News]A truck bomb destroys the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in America’s worst domestic terrorist attack. Timothy McVeigh, later convicted in the bombing, has ideological roots both in the Patriot world and among neo-Nazis like William Pierce, whose novel, The Turner Diaries (see 1978), served as a blueprint for the attack. [Washington Post, 4/20/1995; Southern Poverty Law Center, 6/2001; Clarke, 2004, pp. 127] Initially, many believe that no American set off the bomb, and suspect Islamist terrorists of actually carrying out the bombing (see 10:00 a.m. April 19, 1995 and After). Their suspicions prove groundless. Investigators will find that the bomb is constructed of some 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, carried in 20 or so blue plastic 55-gallon barrels arranged inside a rented Ryder truck (see April 15, 1995). The bomb is detonated by a slow-burning safety fuse, most likely lit by hand. The fuse is attached to a much faster-burning detonation cord (“det cord”) which ignites the fertilizer and fuel-oil mixture. [New York Times, 4/27/1995] The Murrah Federal Building houses a number of federal agencies, including offices for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF); the Social Security Administration; the Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Veterans Affairs, and Agriculture departments; and the Secret Service. [Washington Post, 4/20/1995] It encompasses an entire city block, between 5th and 4th Streets and Harvey and Robinson Streets, and features a U-shaped, indented drive on 5th that allows for quick pickup and delivery parking. The entire building’s facade on this side is made of glass, allowing passersby to see into the offices in the building, as well as into the America’s Kids day care center on the second floor, which by this time is filling with children. It is in this driveway that McVeigh parks his truck. [Serrano, 1998, pp. 99-102]Entering the City - McVeigh drives into Oklahoma City, entering around 8:30 a.m. from his overnight stop in Ponca City, Oklahoma; the details reported of his entrance into the city vary (see 7:00 a.m. - 8:35 a.m., April 19, 1995). At 8:55 a.m., a security camera captures the Ryder truck as it heads towards downtown Oklahoma City [Douglas O. Linder, 2006] , a sighting bolstered by three people leaving the building who later say they saw the truck parked in front of the Murrah Building around this time. At 8:57, a security camera captures an image of McVeigh’s Ryder truck being parked outside the Murrah Building in a handicapped zone. One survivor of the blast, Marine recruiter Michael Norfleet, later recalls seeing the Ryder truck parked just outside the building next to the little circle drive on 5th Street leading up to the main entrance of the building. Norfleet had parked his black Ford Ranger in front of the Ryder. McVeigh Lights Fuses - McVeigh drives the Ryder truck west past the Murrah Building on NW Fourth Street, turns north on a one-way street, and turns right on Fifth Street. He pulls the truck over and parks near the Firestone store, next to a chain-link fence. He then lights the five-minute fuses from inside the cab (see 8:15 a.m. and After, April 18, 1995), sets the parking brake, drops the key behind the seat, opens the door, locks the truck, exits, and shuts the door behind him. A man later claims to have hit his brakes to avoid someone matching McVeigh’s description as he crossed Fifth Street around 9:00 a.m. McVeigh walks quickly toward a nearby YMCA building where he has hidden his getaway car, a battered yellow Mercury Marquis (see April 13, 1995), in the adjoining alleyway, crossing Robinson Street and crossing another street to get to the alleyway. He begins to jog as he approaches his car. He later says he remembers a woman looking at him as she is walking down the steps to enter the building; he will describe her as white, in her mid-30s, with dirty blonde hair. According to McVeigh’s own recollection, he is about 20 feet into the alley when the bomb goes off. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 184-185; PBS Frontline, 1/22/1996; Serrano, 1998, pp. 158; Douglas O. Linder, 2006; The Oklahoman, 4/2009]Truck Explodes - At 9:02 a.m., the truck explodes, destroying most of the Murrah Building and seriously damaging many nearby buildings. Eventually, it will be determined that 168 people die in the blast, including 19 children. Over 500 are injured. The children are in the second-story day care center just above the parking space where McVeigh leaves the Ryder truck. McVeigh will later tell his biographers that he is lifted off his feet by the power of the blast. Devastation and Death - When the bomb detonates, the day care center and the children plummet into the basement. The building, constructed with large glass windows, collapses, sending a wave of flying glass shards and debris into the building and the surrounding area. The oldest victim is 73-year-old Charles Hurlbert, who has come to the Social Security office on the first floor. Hurlbert’s wife Jean, 67, also dies in the blast. The youngest victim is four-month-old Gabeon Bruce, whose mother is also in the Social Security office. One victim, Rebecca Anderson, is a nurse who runs towards the building to render assistance. She never makes it to the building; she is struck in the head by a piece of falling debris and will die in a hospital four days after the blast. Her heart and kidneys will be transplanted into survivors of the bombing. [Denver Post, 6/3/1997; New York Times, 6/3/1997; Serrano, 1998, pp. 153-154; Oklahoma City Journal Record, 3/29/2001] Sherri Sparks, who has friends still unaccounted for in the building, tells a reporter in the hours after the blast, “Oh, I can’t stand the thought of… those innocent children, sitting there playing, thinking they’re safe, and then this happens.” The explosion leaves a 30-foot-wide, 8-foot-deep crater in the street that is covered by the wreckage of the building’s upper floors. The north face of the nine-story building collapses entirely. [Washington Post, 4/20/1995; Washington Post, 4/22/1995] Mary Heath, a psychologist who works about 20 blocks from the Murrah Building, says the blast “shook the daylights out of things—it scared us to death. We felt the windows shake before we heard the noise.” In a neighboring building, a Water Resources Board meeting is just commencing; the audiotape of the meeting captures the sound of the blast (see 9:02 a.m. and After, April 19, 1995). [Washington Post, 4/20/1995; The Oklahoman, 4/2009] Norfleet, trapped in the Marine Corps office, is thrown into a wall by the explosion. His skull is fractured, and a shard of glass punctures his right eye. Three separate arteries are pierced, and Norfleet begins bleeding heavily. Two supply sergeants in the office are far less injured; Norfleet asks one, “How bad am I hurt?” and one replies, “Sir, you look really bad.” One of the two begins giving Norfleet first aid; Norfleet later recalls: “He immediately went into combat mode and started taking care of me. He laid me on a table and he started looking for bandages to administer first aid. And while I was laying on that table, I just knew that I was losing strength and that if I stayed in the building, I would die.” Norfleet wraps a shirt around his head and face to slow the bleeding, and the two sergeants help him to the stairs, through the fallen rubble, and eventually out. Norfleet will later say that he follows “a blood trail of somebody that had gone down the steps before me” to get outside, where he is quickly put into an ambulance. He loses almost half his body’s blood supply and his right eye. He will never fly again, and will soon be discharged for medical incapacity. [Serrano, 1998, pp. 161-162] Eighteen-month-old Phillip Allen, called “P.J.” by his parents, miraculously survives the blast. The floor gives way beneath him and he plunges 18 feet to land on the stomach of an adult worker on the floor below, Calvin Johnson. Landing on Johnson’s stomach saves P.J.‘s life. Johnson is knocked unconscious by the blast and by the impact of the little boy falling on him, but when he awakes, he carries the toddler to safety. P.J.‘s grandfather calls the child “Oklahoma’s miracle kid,” and media reports use the label when retelling the story of the miraculous rescue. P.J. is one of six children in the day care center to survive the blast. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 275-277] Some people later report their belief that the Murrah Building was rocked by a second explosion just moments after the first one, the second coming from a secure area managed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) that illegally stored explosives. Law professor Douglas O. Linder will later write, “Both seismic evidence and witness testimony supports the ‘two blast theory.’” [Douglas O. Linder, 2006] That theory is later disputed (see After 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Explosion's Effects Felt Miles Away - Buildings near the Murrah are also damaged, seven severely, including the Journal Record newspaper building, the offices of Southwestern Bell, the Water Resources Board, an Athenian restaurant, the YMCA, a post office building, and the Regency Tower Hotel. Two Water Resources Board employees and a restaurant worker are killed in the blast. The Journal Record building loses its roof. Assistant Fire Chief Jon Hansen later recalls, “The entire block looked like something out of war-torn Bosnia.” Every building within four blocks of the Murrah suffers some effects. A United Parcel Service truck 10 miles away has its windows shattered by the blast. Cars in parking lots around the area catch fire and burn. Millions of sheets of paper, and an innumerable number of glass shards, shower down for hundreds of feet around the building. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 28-30]Truck Axle Crushes Nearby Car - Richard Nichols (no relation to bomber Timothy McVeigh’s co-conspirator Terry Nichols), a maintenance worker standing with his wife a block and a half away from the Murrah Building, is spun around by the force of the blast. They throw open the back door of their car and begin taking their young nephew Chad Nichols out of the back seat, when Richard sees a large shaft of metal hurtling towards them. The “humongous object… spinning like a boomerang,” as Richard later describes it, hits the front of their Ford Festiva, smashing the windshield, crushing the front end, driving the rear end high into the air, and sending the entire car spinning backwards about 10 feet. Chad is not seriously injured. The metal shaft is the rear axle of the Ryder truck. Later, investigators determine that it weighs 250 pounds and was blown 575 feet from where the truck was parked. Governor Frank Keating (R-OK) points out the axle to reporters when he walks the scene a day or so later, causing some media outlets to incorrectly report that Keating “discovered” the axle. The scene will take investigators days to process for evidence. [Stickney, 1996, pp. 32; New York Times, 6/3/1997; Serrano, 1998, pp. 187-189]First Responders Begin Arriving - Within minutes, survivors begin evacuating the building, and first responders appear on the scene (see 9:02 a.m. - 10:35 a.m. April 19, 1995). McVeigh's Getaway - McVeigh flees the bomb site in his Mercury getaway car (see 9:02 a.m. and After, April 19, 1995), but is captured less than 90 minutes later (see 9:03 a.m. -- 10:17 a.m. April 19, 1995).

Norma McCorvey. [Source: Famous Why (.com)]Norma McCorvey, who under the pseudonym “Jane Roe” successfully mounted a challenge to the federal government’s ban on abortion that resulted in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision (see January 22, 1973), has recanted her support for most abortions, according to the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue (OR—see 1986). McCorvey has quit her job at a women’s medical clinic and joined the group, OR officials say. Her switch is apparently triggered by her recent baptism by OR leader Reverend Flip Benham. According to news reports, the organization “regards as a coup McCorvey’s defection after years as a symbol of a woman’s right to abortion.” Bill Price of Texans United for Life says, “The poster child has jumped off the poster.” McCorvey still supports the right to abortions in the first three months of pregnancy, a position fundamentally at odds with Operation Rescue doctrine. McCorvey also acknowledges that she is a lesbian and that she is uncomfortable with many aspects of conservative Christian life. [Newport News Daily Press, 8/18/1995; Newsweek, 8/21/1995]

Sam Francis. [Source: American Renaissance]Sam Francis, a senior columnist and writer for the conservative Washington Times, is fired after suggesting that white Americans must reassert what he believes is their innate dominance over other races. At the 1995 American Renaissance conference, hosted by the white supremacist organization of the same name, Francis tells his audience: “[Whites] must reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.” [Nation, 6/10/1996; Washington Times, 2/17/2005; National Council of La Raza, 2010 ] Francis’s last column for the Times also contributed to his dismissal. On July 27, 1995, he wrote, in part: “If the sin is hatred or exploitation, they [Southern Baptists repenting their support of slavery in the mid-1800s] may be on solid grounds, but neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin. Indeed, there are at least five clear passages in the letters of Paul that explicitly enjoin ‘servants’ to obey their masters, and the Greek words for ‘servants’ in the original text are identical to those for ‘slaves.’ Neither Jesus nor the apostles nor the early church condemned slavery, despite countless opportunities to do so, and there is no indication that slavery is contrary to Christian ethics or that any serious theologian before modern times ever thought it was. Not until the Enlightenment of the 18th century did a bastardized version of Christian ethics condemn slavery. Today we know that version under the label of ‘liberalism,’ or its more extreme cousin, communism.… What has happened in the centuries since the Enlightenment is the permeation of the pseudo-Christian poison of equality into the tissues of the West, to the point that the mainstream churches now spend more time preaching against apartheid and colonialism than they do against real sins like pinching secretaries and pilfering from the office coffee pool. The Southern Baptists, because they were fortunate enough to flourish in a region where the false sun of the Enlightenment never shone, succeeded in escaping this grim fate, at least until last week.” [Media Matters, 12/13/2004]

Randall Terry, the founder and former leader of the anti-abortion group Operation Save America (formerly named Operation Rescue), says that his vision of the organization’s goals was not merely to stop abortions in America, but to “recapture the power bases of America.” In a video broadcast on PBS, Terry says: “From the beginning when I founded Operation Rescue, the vision was not solely to end child-killing; the vision was to recapture the power bases of America, for child-killing to be the first domino, if you will, to fall in a series of dominoes. My feeling was, and still is, once we mobilize the momentum, the manpower, the money, and all that goes with that to make child-killing illegal, we will have sufficient moral authority and moral force and momentum to get the homosexual movement back in the closet, to get the condom pushers in our schools to be back on the fringes of society where they belong where women are treated with dignity, not as Playboy bunnies, etc., etc. We want to recapture the country, because right now the country’s power bases are in the hands of a very determined, very evil elite who are selling us a bill of goods. They call it good but it truly is evil. They say, ‘Here, it’s sweet,’ but in reality it’s bitter. It’s wormwood and gall.” [The Public Eye, 4/2000 ; Cronin, 2002, pp. 440; Feminist Women's Health Center News, 2010]

The Annenberg Public Policy Center conducts an eleven-month survey of political talk radio, focusing primarily on broadcasts by conservative Rush Limbaugh. It obtains, or creates, daily transcripts of Limbaugh’s shows. Subjected to content analysis, the researchers find that Limbaugh focuses most strongly on the following topics: President Bill Clinton (100 percent, or discussed every day). The mainstream media (100 percent), focusing on the New York Times (83 percent), the Washington Post (66 percent), CNN (57 percent), and the three major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, at least 39 percent. Many, but not all, of these mentions are negative. Limbaugh also positively cites the Wall Street Journal (48 percent) and the Washington Times (32 percent), and often directs listeners to these news producers’ content. Democrats (96 percent). Republicans (94 percent). Senator Bob Dole (R-KS), the Republican presidential contender (91 percent). Hillary Clinton, the First Lady (88 percent). As noted, most of Limbaugh’s remarks about mainstream media outlets are negative, except when they provide something with which he can agree—most often news items or tidbits that he can use to denigrate the Clintons, the Clinton administration, or Congressional Democrats. Findings - The Annenberg study finds that Limbaugh’s listeners distrust the mainstream media more than any other group measured (two of the study’s authors, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, later note that Fox News has not yet emerged as a powerful conservative alternative). In the 1996 study, that mistrust does not translate into a general shunning of mainstream news for conservative alternatives, but in a 2004 study also conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, that dynamic will have changed, with many Limbaugh listeners getting the bulk of their news from Fox News and from conservative Internet news providers. In 1996, Limbaugh’s listeners are heavy consumers of mainstream media reporting, albeit with a strong skeptical bent. [Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 168-171]

Ron Paul. [Source: Think Progress]Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) takes full credit for the racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic content featured in his newsletters (see 1978-1996), and says that he writes the material. Paul, on his own and through his campaign staffers, denies that the content is actually racist, saying that the material as quoted in the press is taken “out of context.” Paul’s opponent for his House seat, Charles “Lefty” Morris (D-TX), has released some of the newsletter material to the Texas press, prompting Paul to accuse him of “name-calling,” “race-baiting,” “political demagoguery,” and “gutter-level politics.” Morris says of Paul’s statements: “Many of his views are out on the fringe.… His statements speak for themselves.” The NAACP has also questioned Paul’s stance on race; a Texas NAACP spokesman says of Paul, “Someone who holds those views signals or indicates an inability to represent all constituents without regard to race, creed, or color.” Paul repeatedly denies being a racist, and says to “selectively quote” from his newsletters is “misrepresentation.” He says that articles in his newsletters that claim “95 percent of the black males” in Washington, DC, “are semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” that “it is hardly irrational… to be afraid of black men.… Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers,” that blacks only commit “crimes that terrify Americans,” and other such claims are not his beliefs, but “assumption[s] you can gather” from reports on crime; he also claims that civil rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson have made similar claims. A 1992 claim that “[o]pinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions” is Paul’s work, says campaign spokesman Michael Sullivan, but the issue is political philosophy, not race: Sullivan says Paul does not believe that people who disagree with him are sensible. Sullivan goes on to say: “You have to understand what he is writing. Democrats in Texas are trying to stir things up by using half-quotes to impugn his character. His writings are intellectual. He assumes people will do their own research, get their own statistics, think for themselves, and make informed judgments.” His newsletter’s name-calling of Representative Barbara Jordan (D-TX) as “Barbara Morondon” and its claim that she is the “archetypical half-educated victimologist” whose “race and sex protect her from criticism,” a “fraud,” and an “empress without clothes” is merely an attempt to portray Paul’s “clear philosophical difference” with her. He does not deny a 1993 accusation that Representative Jack Kemp (R-NY) “made a pass at a female reporter young enough to be his daughter.” Nor does he deny a number of newsletter items offering to help readers avoid paying taxes to the IRS and supporting violent attacks on IRS offices, though Sullivan says such claims were written in an “abstract” sense. Paul also says he has no idea why he is listed in a directory by the Heritage Front, a Canadian-based neo-Nazi group, which lists his newsletter under the heading “Racialists and Freedom Fighters.” [Dallas Morning News, 5/22/1996; Houston Chronicle, 5/23/1996; Reason, 1/11/2008]

The FBI orders reporters and photographers to leave a hill overlooking the Montana Freemen compound, currently surrounded by law enforcement authorities (see March 25, 1996), but deny that the move is a prelude to a raid against the group. “We’re trying to do everything we can to peacefully resolve the situation,” Attorney General Janet Reno says, “and we will continue those efforts.” FBI officials say they decided to evict the news media after a Fox Television news crew went to a fence around the compound the night of May 28, and attempted to negotiate for interviews without FBI knowledge. “The negotiators have their own strategy for contacting the Freemen and don’t want this kind of disruption,” says a senior official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity. Fox News chairman Roger Ailes complains that his journalists are being used as scapegoats, and alleges that the FBI had planned on moving the news media from the hill well before they made contact with the Freemen. [Associated Press, 5/30/1996]

Sarah Palin during her tenure on Wasilla’s City Council. [Source: Sarah Palin Truth Squad (.com)]Wasilla, Alaska, City Council member Sarah Palin, a 32-year-old former sportscaster and current housewife, challenges three-term incumbent John C. Stein for mayor. Wasilla is a small town of less than 5,000 residents; Palin is popular among residents for her success in beauty pageants and for her history as a point guard on the 1982 Wasilla High School state basketball championship team. Before the Palin campaign, mayoral elections have focused relentlessly on local issues, such as paving dirt roads and putting in sewers. Personal campaigning revolved around who went hunting with who. [Anchorage Daily News, 10/23/2006; New York Times, 9/2/2008; Anchorage Daily News, 9/2/2008] Instead, Palin, guided by advisers such as Mark Chryson of the Alaskan Independent Party (AIP—see October 10, 2008), runs an unusually negative campaign against Stein. Her campaign slogan is “Positively Sarah.” Palin emphasizes her stance against abortion, her membership in the National Rifle Association (NRA), and her church work. She runs as an outsider against what she calls an “old boy network” that has controlled Wasilla’s government long enough. She vows to replace “stale leadership” and a “tax-and-spend” mentality with “fresh ideas and energy,” and, in campaign literature, complains that citizens asking city leaders for help routinely encounter “complacency, inaction, and even total disregard.” The Alaska Republican Party runs advertisements on Palin’s behalf, a first in Wasilla politics as Alaska municipal politics are officially nonpartisan. Palin also mounts a stinging negative campaign against Stein, including insinuations that he, a Lutheran, is a secret Jew. “Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff and I was like, ‘Whoa,’” Stein will later recall. “But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits, and the religious born-again thing. I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’” Of the Jewish campaign theme, Stein will recall: “I thought: ‘Holy cow, what’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’m Jewish or Islamic?‘… The point was that she was a born-again Christian.” Stein, who is pro-choice, remembers a “national anti-abortion outfit sen[ding] little pink cards to voters in Wasilla endorsing her.” Victoria Naegele, the managing editor of the local Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman newspaper and herself a conservative Christian, will later recall: “[Stein] figured he was just going to run your average, friendly small-town race. But it turned into something much different than that.… I just thought, ‘That’s ridiculous, she should concentrate on roads, not abortion.’” Palin wins with 638 votes, a 58 percent majority. A local TV station calls her Wasilla’s “first Christian mayor,” though Stein is a Christian as well. [Anchorage Daily News, 10/23/2006; New York Times, 9/2/2008; Time, 9/2/2008; Seattle Times, 9/7/2008; Washington Post, 9/14/2008] Palin has a tumultuous first term as mayor (see Late 1996 - 1999).

Spiro T. Agnew, the Republican vice president who resigned his office after pleading no contest to tax evasion charges (see October 10, 1973), dies of leukemia in his home state of Maryland. Former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan recalls Agnew’s “raw political courage” for serving as “the voice of the silent majority” during the Nixon administration, and says: “Of all those caught up—on both sides—in the American tragedy of 1973-1974 [Watergate], Spiro Agnew was one of the good guys.… At a time when the establishment was craven in pandering to rioters and demonstrators, Spiro Agnew told the truth.” Buchanan helped write some of Agnew’s most inflammatory speeches (see 1969-1971). Other Republicans also laud Agnew, even though for twenty years Agnew has had virtually no contact with any of his former Republican confrerees. “Spiro Agnew earned the support of millions of his countrymen because he was never afraid to speak out and stand up for America,” says Senator Bob Dole (R-KS), the Republican candidate for president. “He minced no words when patriotism and military service were ridiculed.” And former President George H.W. Bush says of Agnew: “He was a friend. I loved his family.” Former Democratic senator and World War II veteran George McGovern, whose courage and patriotism was harshly attacked by Agnew during the 1972 presidential campaign, says, “Some of the things he said during his lifetime were extreme and regrettable, but nonetheless I mourn his passing.” Former Nixon speechwriter Vic Gold is perhaps the most rhapsodic, saying of Agnew, “He was the John the Baptist of the Reagan revolution.” [New York Times, 9/19/1996; Knight Ridder, 9/19/1996] Reporter Sandy Grady is less forgiving. “Agnew was a small-time pol who became the most blatant crook to sit one heartbeat away from the presidency,” he writes. “He was a demagogue ranting ghost-written bile that split Americans amid the war and fires of the ‘60s. But political peers, sensing in Agnew’s tumble their own fragility, always treated Spiro as gently as a museum vase.” [Knight Ridder, 9/19/1996] Historian Allan Lichtman observes, “He will always stand as one of the symbols of the corruption that undermined the Nixon administration.” Fellow historian Joan Huff, author of a biography of Nixon, dismisses Agnew as “a tiny blip in history.” [Greensboro News & Record, 9/19/1996]

Fox News logo. [Source: Fox News]Fox News begins broadcasting on US cable television. Fox News provides 24-hour news programming alongside the nation’s only other such cable news provider, CNN. Fox executive Roger Ailes, a former campaign adviser for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (see 1968, January 25, 1988, and September 21 - October 4, 1988), envisions Fox News as a conservative “antidote” to what he calls the “liberal bias” of the rest of American news broadcasting. Ailes uses many of the methodologies and characteristics of conservative talk radio, and brings several radio hosts on his channel, including Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, to host television shows. [Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 47; New York Magazine, 5/22/2011] Referring to Ailes’s campaign experience, veteran Republican consultant Ed Rollins later says: “Because of his political work, he understood there was an audience. He knew there were a couple million conservatives who were a potential audience, and he built Fox to reach them.” [New York Magazine, 5/22/2011]Ailes Planned for Fox News as Far Back as 1970 - Ailes began envisioning a conservative news provider to counter what he considers the mainstream media’s “liberal bias” as early as 1970, when he became heavily involved with a Nixon administration plan to plant conservative propaganda in news outlets across the nation (see Summer 1970). In 1971, he headed a short-lived private conservative television news network, Television News Incorporated (TVN—see 1971-1975), which foundered in 1975 in part because of its reporters and staffers balking at reporting Ailes-crafted propaganda instead of “straight” news. Ailes told a New York Times reporter in 1991 that he was leaving politics, saying: “I’ve been in politics for 25 years. It’s always been a detour. Now my business has taken a turn back to my entertainment and corporate clients.” But Ailes misinformed the reporter. He continued to work behind the scenes on the 1992 Bush re-election campaign, providing the campaign with attack points against Democratic contender Bill Clinton (D-AR) and earning the nickname “Deep Throat” from Bush aides. Though Ailes did do work in entertainment, helping develop tabloid television programs such as The Maury Povich Show and heading the cable business news network CNBC for three years, Ailes has continued to stay heavily involved in Republican politics ever since. Ailes became involved in the creation of Fox News in early 1996 after he left NBC, which had canceled his show America’s Talking and launched a new cable news network, MSNBC, without asking for Ailes’s involvement. Fox News is owned by News Corporation (sometimes abbreviated NewsCorp), an international media conglomerate owned by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch. When NBC allowed Ailes to leave, Jack Welch, the chairman of NBC’s parent company General Electric, said, “We’ll rue the day we let Roger and Rupert team up.” Murdoch has already tried and failed to buy CNN, and has already begun work on crafting news programs with hard-right slants, such as a 60 Minutes-like show that, reporter Tim Dickinson will write, “would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social program.” Dan Cooper, the managing editor of the pre-launch Fox News, later says, “The idea of a masquerade was already around prior to Roger arriving.” Eric Burns, who will work for ten years as a Fox News media critic before leaving the network, will say in 2011: “There’s your answer right there to whether Fox News is a conventional news network or whether it has an agenda. That’s its original sin.” To get Fox News onto millions of cable boxes at once, Murdoch paid hundreds of millions of dollars to cable providers to air his new network. Murdoch biographer Neil Chenoweth will later write: “Murdoch’s offer shocked the industry. He was prepared to shell out half a billion dollars just to buy a news voice.” Dickinson will write, “Even before it took to the air, Fox News was guaranteed access to a mass audience, bought and paid for.” Ailes praised Murdoch’s “nerve,” saying, “This is capitalism and one of the things that made this country great.” [New York Magazine, 5/22/2011; Rolling Stone, 5/25/2011]Using Conservative Talk Radio as Template - In 2003, NBC’s Bob Wright will note that Fox News uses conservative talk radio as a template, saying: “[W]hat Fox did was say, ‘Gee, this is a way for us to distinguish ourselves. We’re going to grab this pent-up anger—shouting—that we’re seeing on talk radio and put it onto television.’” CBS News anchor Dan Rather will be more critical, saying that Fox is a reflection of Murdoch’s own conservative political views. “Mr. Murdoch has a business, a huge worldwide conglomerate business,” Rather says. “He finds it to his benefit to have media outlets, press outlets, that serve his business interests. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s a free country. It’s not an indictable offense. But by any clear analysis the bias is towards his own personal, political, partisan agenda… primarily because it fits his commercial interests.” [New Yorker, 5/26/2003]Putting Ideology Over Journalistic Ethics, Practices - Ailes, determined not to let journalists with ethical qualms disrupt Fox News as they had his previous attempt at creating a conservative news network (see 1971-1975), brought a hand-picked selection of reporters and staffers with demonstrable conservative ideologies from NBC, including business anchor Neil Cavuto and Steve Doocy, who hosts the morning talk show “Fox and Friends.” Both Cavuto and Doocy are Ailes loyalists who, Dickinson will say, owe their careers to Ailes. Ailes then tapped Brit Hume, a veteran ABC correspondent and outspoken conservative, to host the main evening news show, and former Bush speechwriter Tony Snow as a commentator and host. John Moody, a forcefully conservative ABC News veteran, heads the newsroom. Ailes then went on a purge of Fox News staffers. Joe Peyronnin, who headed the network before Ailes displaced him, later recalls: “There was a litmus test. He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.” Ailes confronted reporters with suspected “liberal bias” with “gotcha” questions such as “Why are you a liberal?” Staffers with mainstream media experience were forced to defend their employment at such venues as CBS News, which he calls the “Communist Broadcast System.” He fired scores of staffers for perceived liberal leanings and replaced them with fiery young ideologues whose inexperience helps Ailes shape the network to his vision. Before the network aired its first production, Ailes had a seminal meeting with Moody. “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals,” he told Moody. “And we’ve got to fight that.” Reporters and staffers knew from the outset that Fox, despite its insistence on being “fair and balanced” (see 1995), was going to present news with a conservative slant, and if that did not suit them, they would not be at Fox long. A former Fox News anchor later says: “All outward appearances were that it was just like any other newsroom. But you knew that the way to get ahead was to show your color—and that your color was red.” The anchor refers to “red” as associated with “red state,” commonly used on news broadcasts to define states with Republican majorities. Ailes will always insist that while his network’s talk-show hosts, such as O’Reilly, Hannity, and others, are frankly conservative, Fox’s hard-news shows maintain what he calls a “bright, clear line” that separates conservative cant from reported fact. In practice, this is not the case. Before Fox aired its first broadcast, Ailes tasked Moody to keep the newsroom in line. Early each morning, Ailes has a meeting with Moody, often with Hume on speakerphone from the Washington office, where the day’s agenda is crafted. Moody then sends a memo to the staff telling them how to slant the day’s news coverage according to the agenda of those on “the Second Floor,” as Ailes and his vice presidents are known. A former Fox anchor will later say: “There’s a chain of command, and it’s followed. Roger talks to his people, and his people pass the message on down.” After the 2004 presidential election, Bush press secretary Scott McClellan will admit, “We at the White House were getting them talking points.” Targeting a Niche Demographic - Fox New’s primary viewership defies most demographic wisdom. According to information taken in 2011, it averages 65 years of age (the common “target demographic” for age is the 18-24 bracket), and only 1.38% of its viewers are African-American. Perhaps the most telling statistics are for the Hannity show: 86% describe themselves as pro-business, 84% believe government “does too much,” 78% are “Christian conservatives,” 78% do not support gay rights, 75% are “tea party backers,” 73% support the National Rifle Association, 66% lack college degrees, and 65% are over age 50. A former NewsCorp colleague will say: “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully. He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.” Other polls from the same time period consistently show that Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers, and one study shows that Fox News viewers become more misinformed the more they watch the network’s programming. Ailes's Security Concerns Affect Operations, Broadcasting - Ailes is uncomfortable in his office, a second-floor corner suite in the Fox News building at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. His office is too close to the street for his tastes; he believes that gay activists intend to try to harm him, either by attacks from outside the building or through assaults carried out from inside. He also believes that he is a top target for al-Qaeda assassins. Ailes barricades himself behind an enormous mahogany desk, insists on having “bombproof” glass installed in the windows, surrounds himself with heavily-armed bodyguards, and carries a firearm (he has a concealed-carry permit). A monitor on his desk shows him what is transpiring outside his office door; once, when he sees a dark-skinned man wearing what he thought was Muslim garb on the monitor, he will order an immediate lockdown of the entire building, shouting, “This man could be bombing me!” The man will turn out to be a janitor. A source close to Ailes will say, “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim—which is consistent with the ideology of his network.” A large security detail escorts him daily to and from his Garrison, New Jersey home to his Manhattan offices; in Garrison, his house is surrounded by empty homes Ailes has bought to enhance his personal security. According to sources close to Ailes, Fox News’s slant on gay rights and Islamist extremism is colored by Ailes’s fear and hatred of the groups. 'We Work for Fox' - Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian and Reagan biographer, will say: “Fox News is totalized: It’s an entire network, devoted 24 hours a day to an entire politics, and it’s broadcast as ‘the news.’ That’s why Ailes is a genius. He’s combined opinion and journalism in a wholly new way—one that blurs the distinction between the two.” Dickinson will write: “Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America’s most conservative voters. GOP candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypassing the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as ‘matadors’ who want to ‘tear down the social order’ with their ‘elitist, horse-dung, socialist thinking.’ Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetizes conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line.” Former Bush speechwriter David Frum will observe: “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.” [New York Magazine, 5/22/2011; Rolling Stone, 5/25/2011]

Sarah Palin, taking the oath of office as mayor, 1997. [Source: New York Times]Wasilla, Alaska, City Council member Sarah Palin becomes Mayor of Wasilla after running a groundbreakingly negative political campaign (see Mid and Late 1996). In her term, she focuses on town development and personal politics. Palin supporters will say that she helps Wasilla develop from a small backwater into a fast-growing suburb, almost doubling its population during her term and bringing in large “box stores” such as Target. Critics will say that she leads the overdevelopment and exploitation of a town that was largely homesteaded farmland before her arrival. Palin weathers a brief attempt at a recall, in part because of town leaders’ fears of retaliation: She quickly becomes known for using her position for exacting revenge against her personal and political enemies. Council member Anne Kilkenny, a Democrat, will later remember Palin’s efforts to get books banned from the Wasilla library. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Kilkenny will recall. Town librarian Mary Ellen Emmons, later described by former mayor John C. Stein as “aghast” at Palin’s requests, resists Palin’s efforts at what Kilkenny will call “censorship,” and Palin promptly fires her. After residents protest, Palin relents and allows Emmons to retake the position, and drops her call to ban the library books; in late 1996, Palin tells a local reporter that her talk of banning books was merely “rhetorical.” Once in office, Palin demands that many of Stein’s supporters and appointees in city government resign, an unprecedented event in town history. She forces the public works director, city planner, museum director, and others to resign, and fires Police Chief Irl Stambaugh, who will lose a wrongful termination lawsuit in 2000. (Stambaugh will later say that part of the reason why Palin fires him is because she tells him “the NRA [National Rifle Association, a powerful Palin supporter] didn’t like me and that they wanted change.” Palin also informs Stambaugh that he “stared” at her during their meetings and attempted to be “physically intimidating.”) Palin packs city government with figures from the area Republican Party, sometimes including wives and relatives, and responds to a question about running city government without experienced government personnel by saying: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” She attempts to replace two council members with persons she knows, though the mayor does not have that legal power. She issues an edict forbidding city employees from talking to anyone in the press without her authorization. Victoria Naegele, the editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, will recall: “It was just things you don’t ever associate with a small town. It was like we were warped into real politics instead of just, ‘Do you like Joe or Mary for the job?’ It was a strange time and [the Frontiersman] came out very harshly against her.” Going against her stance on cutting taxes and restricting spending, Palin forces through a half-cent raise in the local sales tax to pay for a $15 million sports complex that hosts, among other local teams, a junior league hockey team, but the city will later have to pay more than $1.3 million to settle an ownership dispute over the site. And again going against her stated distaste for taking federal money, she makes frequent trips to Washington to lobby for federal funds for local rail projects and a mental health center, among other initiatives. In 1999, Palin will become president of the Alaska Conference of Mayors. [Anchorage Daily News, 10/23/2006; New York Times, 9/2/2008; Time, 9/2/2008; Seattle Times, 9/7/2008; Washington Post, 9/14/2008] Palin will use her second and final term as mayor as a springboard to higher office (see January 2000 - 2002).

The Senate launches an investigation into what a minority (Democratic) report calls “an audacious plan to pour millions of dollars in contributions into Republican campaigns nationwide without disclosing the amount or source” in order to evade campaign finance laws. A shell corporation, Triad Management, is found to have paid more than $3 million for attack ads in 26 House races and three Senate races. More than half of the advertising money came from an obscure nonprofit group, the Economic Education Trust. The Senate minority report finds that “the trust was financed in whole or in part by Charles and David Koch of Wichita, Kansas” (see August 30, 2010). Many in the investigation believe that the Koch brothers paid for the attack ads, most of which aired in states where Koch Industries does business. The brothers refuse to confirm or deny their involvement to reporters. In 1998, the Wall Street Journal will confirm that a consultant on the Kochs’ payroll had been involved in the scheme. Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity will describe the scandal as “historic,” explaining: “Triad was the first time a major corporation used a cutout (a front operation) in a threatening way. Koch Industries was the poster child of a company run amok.” [New Yorker, 8/30/2010]

In an 8-1 decision, the US Supreme Court rules that anti-abortion demonstrators have the right under the First Amendment to confront pregnant women outside health clinics and “strongly urge” them not to have abortions. The decision casts doubt on an array of city ordinances and judicial orders barring protesters from confronting doctors, nurses, and patients outside clinics. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority, rules that there is no “generalized right to be left alone on a public street or sidewalk.” Rather, picketing, leafleting, and loud protesting “are classic forms of speech that lie at the heart of the First Amendment.” The Court affirms that protesters have no right to physically accost or interfere with clients or providers, nor may they trespass on clinic property. They do have the right to shout and chant on public property such as sidewalks. The ruling also reaffirms a 1994 decision that created protest-free zones, sometimes called “fixed bufffer zones,” at the doors and driveways of health clinics. [Los Angeles Times, 2/20/1997]

Conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, who also serves as a political analyst for CBS and MSNBC, publishes an essay in the Washington Post apologizing for her intolerance of homosexuals and claiming to have recanted her views. Ingraham, who won a reputation as a “gay-basher” while writing and editing the conservative Dartmouth Review in her undergraduate days (see 1984), writes that she realized gays are worthy of respect after her brother, Curtis Ingraham, came out as openly gay. Ingraham writes that she witnessed the struggles her brother and his late partner went through in coping with AIDS, writing of their “dignity, fidelity, and courage.” She writes that until her brother’s ordeal, she didn’t understand the urgency for AIDS funding, the problems gay couples face with insurance and the emotional strain of continuing discrimination, and concludes by noting that she regrets her earlier “callous rhetoric.” Jeffrey Hart, the Review’s faculty adviser, responds to Ingraham’s essay with an angry note to the conservative Weekly Standard challenging Ingraham’s choice of bringing the Review into what he calls her “phony political confession”; Hart writes that Ingraham held “the most extreme anti-homosexual views imaginable,” more so than any other staffer. He says she went so far as to avoid a local eatery where she feared the waiters were homosexual and might touch her silverware or spit on her food, exposing her to AIDS. Time columnist Margaret Carlson writes of Ingraham’s apparent conversion, “[D]oesn’t a commentator have a responsibility to find out about such things before venturing an opinion, even if it means looking outside your own tribe?” [Time, 4/21/1997] In 2009, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD) will list Ingraham as one of the media’s worst anti-gay defamers of 2008, noting her repeated attacks on gays from her post as a Fox News contributor. [Out and About, 1/7/2009]

Sarah Palin shortly after being elected mayor of Wasilla. [Source: Associated Press]Wasilla, Alaska, councilman Nick Carney proposes a local gun-control measure that would prohibit residents from carrying guns into schools, bars, hospitals, government offices, and playgrounds. Newly elected Mayor Sarah Palin (see Mid and Late 1996) and her political ally, Mark Chryson, who heads the far-right secessionist Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), craft a way to defeat Carney’s proposal. During one council meeting, Chryson and seven allies storm the meeting in an unannounced appearance. Carney will later recall that the proposal was in its formative stages, and not ready for formal presentation, much less public hearings. Instead, Palin insists that the council have an “ad-hoc” hearing to let Chryson and his allies testify. Palin states that “she invites the public to speak on any issue at any time.” Chryson’s impassioned opposition to the measure is so successful that when Carney attempts to have the ordinance discussed officially at the next regular meeting, he cannot get another council member to second the motion. The measure dies. “A lot of it was the ultra-conservative far right that is against everything in government, including taxes,” Carney will later recall. “A lot of it was a personal attack on me as being anti-gun, and a personal attack on anybody who deigned to threaten their authority to carry a loaded firearm wherever they pleased. That was the tenor of it. And it was being choreographed by Steve Stoll and the mayor.” (Carney is referring to another far-right ally of Palin’s, John Birch Society member Steve Stoll.) Asked if he thought it was Palin who had instigated the turnout, Carney will say, “I know it was.” [Salon, 10/10/2008]

Daniel Rudolph, the brother of accused abortion clinic and Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph (see January 29, 1998 and October 14, 1998), charges the FBI and the national media with persecuting his brother. In protest at what he calls the unfair treatment of his brother, Daniel Rudolph sets up a camera in his Summerville, South Carolina, garage. He then turns on a circular saw and thrusts his left arm into it, cutting off the hand. It will later be surgically reattached. [CNN, 5/31/2003]

William Pierce, the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance (see 1970-1974) and the author of the inflammatory and highly influential white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries (see 1978), says on the Alliance’s weekly radio broadcast American Dissident Voices (ADV): “We are letting the Mexicans and blacks wreck our country today not because the blacks or the Mexicans are able to brainwash us but because the Jews are. Mexicans are not a menace to us because they breed fast and carry switchblades. Blacks are not a menace because there are a lot of them and they have a tendency toward violence. We know how to deal with people who breed fast and carry switchblades. We know how to deal with violent blacks, no matter how many of them there are. Cleaning up America might be a bit messy, but there’s absolutely no question about our ability to do it, if we had the will to do it.” [Center for New Community, 8/2002 ]

David Horowitz, in a 2009 appearance on Fox News. [Source: Fox News]Conservative pundit and author David Horowitz attacks the NAACP’s advocacy of restrictions on gun ownership. Horowitz writes an op-ed for the Internet magazine Salon in response to NAACP president Kwesi Mfume’s announcement that his organization would file a lawsuit to force gun manufacturers “to distribute their product responsibly.” Mfume noted that gun violence kills young black males at a rate almost five times higher than that of young white males, and in a press release, noted, “Firearm homicide has been the leading cause of death among young African-American males for nearly 30 years.” Horowitz calls the NAACP’s lawsuit “an absurd act of political desperation by the civil rights establishment,” and asks: “What’s next? Will Irish-Americans sue whiskey distillers, or Jews the gas company?” It is young black males themselves who bear the responsibility for the disparate number of gun-related deaths among their number, Horowitz writes, and nothing more; the NAACP is itself “racist” for claiming otherwise. “Unfortunately, as a nation we have become so trapped in the melodrama of black victimization and white oppression that we are in danger of losing all sense of proportion,” he writes, and says that the idea of any African-American oppression in America is nothing more than “a politically inspired group psychosis,” inspired by “demagogic race hustlers” and “racial ambulance chasers” such as Mfume, other civil rights leaders, including Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other organizations such as Amnesty International. Horowitz extends his argument to claim that “race baiting” by civil rights organizations, liberals, and Democrats is a tactic being used to defeat Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush (R-TX). The left is threatened by Bush’s “outreach to minority communities and by his support among blacks,” he writes, and asks, “Is there a vast left-wing conspiracy that sees Bush’s black support as a political threat?” Black males, Horowitz writes, die in disproportionately higher numbers because they commit a disproportionately high number of violent crimes; they do so, he writes, because they are predisposed, either by genetics or culturally, to commit violent crimes. Any other explanation, he writes, is to embrace what he calls “institutional racism” that makes excuses and blames whites for the suffering and oppression blacks apparently inflict upon themselves. African-Americans would do well, Horowitz writes, to abandon their support of “patronizing white liberals” and embrace conservative leadership offered by such figures as Bush and New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani. However, he concludes, that “would mean abandoning the ludicrous claim that white America and firearms manufacturers are the cause of the problems afflicting African-Americans. It would mean taking responsibility for their own communities instead.” [Salon, 8/16/1998] In response, Time national correspondent Jack E. White labels Horowitz a “real, live bigot.” White calls Horowitz’s column “a blanket assault on the alleged moral failures of African-Americans so strident and accusatory that it made the anti-black rantings of Dinesh D’Souza (see March 15, 1982 and June 5, 2004) seem like models of fair-minded social analysis.” White asks: “Is he really unaware of concerted attempts by African-American civil rights leaders, clergymen, educators, and elected officials to persuade young black men and women to take more responsibility for their actions? Just two weeks ago, at the National Urban League convention in Houston, I heard Jesse Jackson preach a passionate sermon on that theme. In fact, he and other black leaders have been dwelling on such issues for years.” [Time, 8/30/1998]

Frank Sesno. [Source: Communications Institute]Radio news host Amy Goodman interviews CNN vice president Frank Sesno, and asks about CNN’s practice of putting retired generals on CNN without balancing its coverage with peace activists. Sesno tells Goodman that he believes it is perfectly appropriate to have retired military officers as paid analysts to comment on foreign affairs and military issues, “as long as we identify them as what they are, as long as we believe in our editorial judgment that their judgment is straight and honest—and we judge that—and it’s not a series of talking points, yes, I think it’s appropriate.” He adds, “I think it would become inappropriate if they were our only source of information or our only source of analysis or our only source of whatever the opinion is that we’re assessing, if there were no opposing viewpoints, if you will.” Goodman asks, “If you support the practice of putting ex-military men, generals, on the payroll to share their opinion during a time of war, would you also support putting peace activists on the payroll to give a different opinion in times of war, to be sitting there with the military generals, talking about why they feel that war is not appropriate?” Senso replies: “We bring the generals in because of their expertise in a particular area. We call them analysts. We don’t bring them in as advocates. In fact, we actually talk to them about that. They are not there as advocates.” So “why not put peace activists on the payroll?” Goodman asks. Sesno retorts, “We do,” and Goodman asks, “Who?” Sesno backs off: “On payroll? No, we don’t put peace activists—we don’t—we do not choose to put a lot of people on the payroll. And we will put people on the payroll whom we choose and whom we feel is necessary to put on the payroll.” Sesno cannot recall the last peace activist that he interviewed. Given all of this, Goodman asks how, aside from “screaming in the streets and getting a picture taken,” does an antiwar voice get heard on CNN? Sesno retorts: “Well, that’s up to you. But, you know, there are a lot of ways people have of registering their opinions: through op-eds, through phone-in shows, through protest, if that’s what people are doing.” [Democracy Now!, 4/22/2008]

US Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) introduces the so-called “Liberty Amendment” as, his office says in a press release, “what should be 28th Amendment to the US Constitution; HJ116, the Liberty Amendment.” The Liberty Amendment would repeal the 16th Amendment, which gives the federal government the right to levy income, estate, and gift taxes, and would severely limit the power of the federal government in areas not strictly defined by the Constitution, giving vast new powers to the states instead. The Liberty Amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1952; in 1957, Representative Elmer Hoffman (R-IL) reintroduced it with the new prohibitions on federal taxations. The Anti-Defamation League will write, “In this form, the amendment garnered considerable support among extreme right-wing conservatives as well as the budding libertarian movement.” Right-wing libertarian Willis Stone became the chairman of the Liberty Amendment Committee in the late 1950s, and for years attempted to raise support for the amendment. In recent years, Paul has become the champion of the amendment. After introducing the amendment, Paul tells reporters: “Over the years this amendment has enjoyed widespread support and has been introduced several times in the past by various members of Congress, but finally this measure has a chance of success given the conservative Congress and mood of the country in favor of a more limited, constitutional government which respects individual liberty.… The income tax is the most regressive tax imaginable, allowing government to take first claim on our lives. The income tax assumes government owns us, as individuals, and has a sovereign claim to the fruits of our labor. This is immoral. But government has been compelled to levy this economically damaging tax because government has grown so big. By reducing the size of the federal government to those functions strictly enumerated in the Constitution, there will no longer be a need for the income tax.… Once again, Americans are being treated to hearings on the abuses of the IRS. For as abusive as the IRS is, it is in fact simply the predictable result of the underlying income tax. By eliminating the income tax, we will go a long way toward eliminating these abuses.” Paul has regularly introduced the amendment in the House since 1981. [Ron Paul, 4/28/1999; Anti-Defamation League, 2011] The Liberty Amendment is part of the anti-tax movement stemming at least as far back as 1951 (see 1951-1967).

William Pierce, the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance (see 1970-1974) and the author of the inflammatory and highly influential white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries (see 1978), writes in the Alliance’s monthly Bulletin: “People who are living comfortably now will resist doing anything to jeopardize their situations. Cowards will remain cowards. But a growing minority of serious, moral people will admit finally, at least to themselves, that we have tolerated the Jews for far too long and that revolution is the correct course for patriots.” [Center for New Community, 8/2002 ]

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) blames the recent high school shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on the “liberal elite.” In a speech to a woman’s organization, Gingrich says, “I want to say to the elite in this country—the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite—I accuse you in Littleton and I accuse you in Kosovo of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid for taking responsibility for the things you have done.” The Columbine shooting took place in part because Democrats have taken prayer and God out of the classroom, Gingrich says. [CNN, 5/12/1999]

William Pierce, the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance (see 1970-1974) and the author of the inflammatory and highly influential white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries (see 1978), acquires the largest white power music distributor in the US and renames it Resistance Records (see Late 1993). Some older Alliance members question the wisdom of spending large amount of funds on a white power music label that markets “skinhead” heavy metal and other musical products; Pierce reassures them that the purchase will not only prove to be a valuable way to reach younger potential members, but will generate funds for the organization, saying, “As Resistance Records regains strength, that acquisition should add an increasing number of younger members, in the 18-25 age range, to our ranks.” Pierce is right on both counts. Also, the acquisition brings Pierce closer to the German neo-Nazi party, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NDP). [Center for New Community, 8/2002 ]

Sarah Palin, after a tumultuous first term as mayor of Wasilla (see Late 1996 - 1999), easily beats her opponent, former mayor John C. Stein, 909-292. (The election was actually held on October 5, 1999, but Palin does not officially begin her second term until early in 2000.) One of her second-term campaign promises is to cut spending by cutting her own salary; she indeed cuts her salary from $68,000 to $64,000, but adds a new employee, city administrator John Cramer, to the payroll, dramatically increasing expenditures. Cramer has close ties to powerful Republican lawmaker Lyda Green, and Green endorsed Palin for the mayorality, though she will withdraw that support when Palin later runs for governor. Ironically, Cramer works to ease tensions in Wasilla during Palin’s second and final term. Palin’s deputy mayor Dave Chappel will later say: “When I first met Sarah, I would say Sarah was a Republican, with the big R, and that’s it. As she developed politically, she began to see beyond the R and look at the whole picture. She matured.” Palin also hires a lobbyist to represent Wasilla in the nation’s capital (see 2000). She fires Cramer as one of her final acts as mayor in 2002. When her stepmother-in-law, Faye Palin, declares her candidacy to succeed her daughter-in-law, Palin, citing Faye Palin’s support for abortion rights and her status as unaffiliated (i.e. not a Republican), refuses to support her, instead throwing her support to council ally and religious conservative Dianne Keller. [City of Wasilla, 10/5/1999; Anchorage Daily News, 10/23/2006; New York Times, 9/2/2008; Seattle Times, 9/7/2008] A former city council member will later recall the 2002 Keller-Palin election as contentious, largely because of the controversy over abortion; “People were writing BABYKILLER on Faye’s campaign signs just a few days before the election,” the council member will recall. [Time, 9/2/2008]Leaves Wasilla with Increased Taxation, Large Debt - During her two terms, Palin increases general government expenditures by over a third, increases the operating budget by over a third after adjusting for inflation, increases the tax burden on Wasilla residents and businesses by 25 percent after adjusting for inflation, reduces property taxes in favor of a regressive sales tax, and while inheriting a budget with zero debt, leaves Wasilla with an indebtness of over $23 million. Keller, who will continue as mayor through 2008, will say that much of the debt and tax increases are due to Wasilla’s growth during Palin’s tenure. [St. Petersburg Times, 8/31/2008]On to Governorship - Palin will lose her first attempt at gaining statewide office, coming in second in the 2002 Republican primary for lieutenant governor. She will not succeed in persuading Governor Frank Murkowski (R-AK) to appoint her to complete his term in the US Senate, a seat which will go to Murkowski’s daughter Lisa (R-AK) instead. In 2003, Governor Murkowski will appoint Palin to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She will leave the commission in 2004 over claims that it is behaving unethically, and will defeat Murkowski in 2006, becoming governor of Alaska. [Anchorage Daily News, 9/2/2008]

Early in her second term as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (see January 2000 - 2002), Sarah Palin hires a lobbyist, Steven W. Silver of Robertson, Monagle & Eastaugh. The decision to hire a lobbyist is unprecedented in the history of the town. Silver secures $26.9 million in federal funds for Wasilla, though Palin campaigned against “wasteful government spending” in her runs for mayor, and as a state and national figure will campaign against “federal earmarks” and such spending. Silver is a close political ally of US Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK). Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense will later say: “She certainly wasn’t shy about putting the old-boy network to use to bring home millions of dollars. She’s a little more savvy to the ways of Washington than she’s let on.” [Washington Post, 9/2/2008]

Virtual First Down [Source: Princeton Video Image]Following the publication of a front-page article in the New York Times on the use of fake, digitally-created images in some CBS programs like “The Early Show”, CBS executives call a press conference to defend and explain the practice. While the technology has been used in sports broadcasting for several years now (see 1999 and After), many are troubled by its use in news programs. CBS Television used the technology developed by Princeton Video Image to superimpose a digitally created CBS logo to block out an NBC-sponsored sign in Times Square during its news coverage of New Year’s Eve celebrations. Dan Rather, the CBS anchor, calls that “a mistake”. “At the very least we should have pointed out to viewers that we were doing it.” Both NBC and ABC told the New York Times that they had not used the technology in their news broadcasting. But CBS defends the practice. “Anytime there’s an NBC logo up on our network we’ll block it again”, says Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS Television. Andrew Heyward, the president of the news division, acknowledges the potential for abuse or deception: “He said that he understood the argument against the use of the technology—which is widely employed in sports and some entertainment shows—on news programs. The danger is ‘that it looks too real and therefore it’s wrong or potentially wrong,’ he said. ‘I certainly agree it’s potentially subject to abuse.’ He noted that advances in computer-generated techniques had made things like missiles hitting Baghdad and airplanes crashing look so real that it was incumbent on networks to underscore that these were not real images. ‘We’re not sitting here rubbing our hands, saying how can we use this again,’ Mr. Heyward said. ‘We are not in the deception business. We’re in the reality business; we’re in the accuracy business. To the extent that this technology interferes with that core belief we’re not going to do it. We will absolutely take seriously the use of this tool.’” [New York Times, 1/12/2000; New York Times, 1/13/2000; Independent, 1/24/2000; New York Times, 1/27/2000]

Eason Jordan. [Source: Eason Jordan]The US Army’s 4th PSYOPS (Psychological Operations) Group conducts a military symposium in Arlington, Virginia; during the symposium, the unit commander, Colonel Christopher St. John, calls for “greater cooperation between the armed forces and [the nation’s] media giants.” St. John discusses at some length how Army psyops personnel have worked for CNN (see April 22, 1999) and helped that news provider produce news stories. Dutch reporter Abe De Vries finds the information through a February 17 article in an official French intelligence newsletter. Virtually no mainstream American news outlets besides the San Jose Mercury News report the story. In March, CNN senior executive Eason Jordan admits that five “interns” from an Army psyops unit functioned as “observers” in three different units of the network beginning on June 7, 1999, for several weeks at a stretch. He says: “I think they came one at a time, and they worked in three parts of the company: in our radio—and I should be clear, not work, they did not work. They did not function as journalists. They were not paid. But they were in our radio department, our satellites area and our Southeast bureau.… [T]hey should not have been here, they’re not here anymore, and they will not be here ever again.” [Democracy Now!, 3/24/2000]

During an interview about CNN allowing Army psyops personnel to serve as interns inside the network (see March 24, 2000), reporter Amy Goodman asks CNN executive Eason Jordan about the network’s practice of using retired military generals and other high-ranking officers to serve as military analysts in times of war, without balancing the generals’ perspective with commentary from peace activists and antiwar leaders. Jordan says he is not aware of any such policy at CNN; however: “In wartime, we want people who understand how wars are orchestrated. We want experts who can address those issues. And if we have not put enough peace activists on the air, that’s not because we have some policy against that.” Jordan denies that the military analysts are there to discuss policy, but merely to explicate technical issues for the audience. Liberal columnist and editor Alexander Cockburn asks a hypothetical question: if indeed the Army, for example, had mounted “an incredibly successful military penetration of CNN,” and that everything Jordan is saying is complete disinformation: “[H]ow would you disprove that? Because, after all, everything that you see on CNN would buttress that conclusion. CNN was an ardent advocate of the war [in Kosovo, and] did not give a balanced point of view. They fueled at all points the Pentagon, State Department, White House approach to the war. I think you could demonstrate that far beyond the confines of your program, and it’s been done by a number of people. I’m just saying that if you looked at it objectively from afar, actually what you could see is evidence of an enormously successful PSYOPS operation. So, in a way, the burden is far more on CNN to disprove what you could conclude was a successful operation.… CNN, as an outlet, both in Iraq and now, is, to my view of thinking, devotes about 95 percent of its time in times of war to putting the US government point of view.” Jordan calls Cockburn’s hypothesizing “ridiculous.” [Democracy Now!, 3/24/2000]

CNN logo. [Source: CNN]After the San Jose Mercury News reports on a February symposium where the commander of an Army psyops (psychological operations) unit discussed how Army psyops personnel have worked closely with the US news network CNN (see Early February, 2000), journalist Amy Goodman discusses the issue with three guests: Dutch journalist Abe De Vries, who first broke the story; liberal columnist Alexander Cockburn, who wrote about it in the Mercury News and in his own publication, Counterpunch; and CNN senior executive Eason Jordan. De Vries says he originally read of the symposium in a newsletter published by a French intelligence organization, and confirmed it with Army spokespersons. Cockburn says that after he wrote about it in his publication, he was contacted by an “indignant” Jordan, who called the story “a terrible slur on the good name of CNN and on the quality of its news gathering.” Cockburn says that he, too, confirmed that Army psyops personnel—“interns,” Jordan told Cockburn—worked for several weeks at CNN, but the network “maintains stoutly, of course, that these interns, you know, they just were there making coffee or looking around, and they had no role in actually making news.” Goodman asks Jordan about the story, and he insists that the Army personnel were nothing more than unpaid interns who “functioned as observers” and were “always under CNN supervision. They did not decide what we would report, how we would report it, when we would report something.…[T]hey had no role whatsoever in our Kosovo coverage and, in fact, had no role whatsoever in any of our coverage.” Jordan says that allowing them into CNN was a mistake that the network will not repeat. Jordan says that the psyops personnel merely wanted “to see how CNN functioned, as a lot of people from around the world do. We have observers here from all over the world.” He insists that no one in his division—news gathering—knew about the psyops personnel serving as interns until the program was well underway, and that once they found out about it, they brought it to a halt “within a matter of days.” Cockburn points out that from De Vries’s reporting, the Army was “obviously pleased” by their ability to insert personnel inside one of the nation’s largest news organizations. Cockburn says that it isn’t a matter of the Army personnel conducting some sort of “spy novel” operation inside CNN, but a matter of building relationships: “[T]he question is really, you know, the way these things work. If people come to an office, and they make friends at the office, then the next time they want to know something, they know someone they can call up. A relationship is a much more subtle thing than someone suddenly running in and writing [CNN correspondent Christiane] Amanpour’s copy for her.” Jordan says the entire idea of the US military influencing news coverage is “nonsense” (see April 20, 2008 and Early 2002 and Beyond). Goodman counters with a quote from an Army psyops training manual: “Capture their minds, and their hearts and souls will follow.… Psychological operations, or PSYOP, are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups and individuals. Used in all aspects of war, it’s a weapon whose effectiveness is limited only by the ingenuity of the commander using it. A proven winner in combat and peacetime, PSYOP is one of the oldest weapons in the arsenal of man. It’s an important force, protector, combat multiplier and a non-lethal weapons system.” [Democracy Now!, 3/24/2000]

William Pierce, the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance (see 1970-1974) and the author of the inflammatory and highly influential white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries (see 1978), asks on the Alliance’s weekly radio broadcast American Dissident Voices (ADV), “Why should I not be able to do what is right and natural and kill those who commit such an abomination?” Pierce is referring to white women who date African-American men (see 1988 and November 26, 2004). In the same broadcast, he says: “We should be going from door to door with a list of names and slaying those who have engineered this assault on our people.… And we know who the engineers are.… They are, first and foremost, the media bosses and the other leaders of the Jews.” [Center for New Community, 8/2002 ]

A Florida jury unanimously finds in favor of Jane Akre, a plaintiff suing Fox Television for wrongful termination. Akre and her husband, Steve Wilson, had begun filming a news story for the Tampa, Florida, Fox affiliate on the harmful effects of BGH, or bovine growth hormone. Akre and Wilson were fired when they refused orders from Fox officials to add false information favorable to Monsanto, the manufacturers of BGH, to their story (see December 1996 - December 1997). (The jury rules that Wilson was not harmed by Fox’s actions.) The jury rules that Akre warrants protection under Florida’s whistleblower law, and awards her a $425,000 settlement. Instead of paying the judgment, Fox Television appeals the decision (see February 14, 2003). [St. Louis Journalism Review, 12/1/2007]

John Prescott Ellis. [Source: Bush-Clinton Fraud (.com)]Fox News chairman Roger Ailes (see October 7, 1996), a Republican campaign consultant (see 1968, January 25, 1988, and September 21 - October 4, 1988), chooses an unlikely reporter to anchor Fox’s election night coverage: John Prescott Ellis, a freelance Republican political adviser and the first cousin of George W. Bush (R-TX), the Republican presidential candidate. (Ellis is the son of George Herbert Walker Bush’s sister, Nancy Ellis.) Ellis was originally hired to cover the party primaries. A later study of voting patterns by the University of California will determine that in areas where voters have access to Fox News, the network’s relentless pro-Bush coverage shifts some 200,000 votes from Democrat Al Gore (D-TN) to Bush, but Ailes wants to make sure his network’s coverage is favorable to Bush, and has always had Ellis in mind for the election night anchor position, for which he specifically gives Ellis a 30-day contract. Ellis is very close to Bush’s brother Jeb Bush (R-FL), the sitting governor of Florida (“Jeb” is an acronym for his full name, John Ellis Bush). Ellis recused himself from campaign coverage in a June 1999 Boston Globe column, defending George W. Bush from allegations of cocaine use, calling the Clinton-Gore administration “morally berserk,” and telling his readers, “There is no way for you to know if I am telling you the truth about George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, because in his case, my loyalty goes to him and not to you.” Instead of this posing an ethical dilemma or being seen as a conflict of interest at Fox, Ellis is Ailes’s first and only choice to anchor the network’s election coverage. (Ailes will later tell a February 2001 House committee hearing, “We at Fox News do not discriminate against people because of their family connections”—see February 14, 2001.) [Washington Post, 11/14/2000; Salon, 11/15/2000; Observer, 11/19/2000; Associated Press, 12/11/2000; Buffalo Beat, 12/14/2000; Nation, 11/6/2006; New York Magazine, 5/22/2011] Ellis will pre-emptively call the election for Bush, sparking the Florida recount controversy and helping propel his cousin into the White House (see November 7-8, 2000). In a response to testimony in the same February 2001 House committee hearing, Joan Konner, a journalism professor who will lead a CNN-commissioned independent study of the problems in that network’s election night coverage, will call Ellis’s hiring a substantial breach of journalistic ethics and standards. “If John Ellis had, indeed, made comments stating that his loyalties to the Bush family superceded any commitment he has to his profession or his employer, then I would judge that to be not only a perceived conflict-of-interest but a real conflict-of-interest for a journalist,” she will write in a letter to Representative John Dingell (D-MI). “While that does not disqualify an individual from any position as a journalist, it would, in my judgement, disqualify that person for any decision-making role involving reporting on his relatives during an election. Often friends and relatives are hired by journalism organizations because of their connections to the newsmakers. Their access to sources makes them valuable to the organization. However, the news organization should take every precaution against placing such an individual in an assignment that could result in bias in reporting.” [House of Representatives, Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2/14/2001]

New York Daily News columnist Mike Barnicle, considered by many to be a liberal, tells MSNBC viewers that Democratic presidential contender Al Gore should concede the election. Barnicle says, referring to Gore’s father, former Democratic Senator Albert Gore Sr.: “This could be Al Gore’s moment. It could be the moment where he finally gets the chance to live up to his great father’s ideals and have the courage to step aside.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 11/16/2000; NewsBusters, 2011]

A screenshot from NBC News’s November 19, 2000 ‘Meet the Press’ broadcast, featuring Tim Russert using a whiteboard to illustrate electoral vote tallies. [Source: NBC / Infoimagination (.org)]NBC political commentator Tim Russert recommends that Democratic presidential contender Al Gore either concede the election or wrap up his challege to the reported election results (see Early Morning, November 8, 2000 and After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000) to avoid being called “a whiner.” Russert says that the election recounts are a “crisis” that must be resolved as quickly as possible. Gore “can’t extend it to too long, nor can he become a whiner about Florida at some point,” he says, and adds: “If they continue then to file lawsuits and begin to contest various areas of the state, then people will begin to suggest: ‘uh-oh, this is not magnanimous. This is being a sore loser.’ I think the vice president understands that as well.… If it starts dragging into petty politics and we get to Thanksgiving and we still don’t know who our president is, I think the public will not have much patience with the candidate they believe is dragging it out.” The progressive media watchdog Web site Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) will note that polls show strong majorities of Americans favor continuing the recount process if it will ensure the accuracy of the voting results, even weeks into the recount process. FAIR will write, “[M]ost public opinion polls suggest that citizens are taking a much more reasonable approach to the situation than some of the elite media, supporting a process that emphasizes fairness rather than speed.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 11/16/2000]

ABC News’s Nightline broadcasts an hour-long analysis of the Florida election recount situation (see Early Morning, November 8, 2000 and November 9, 2000). However, host Ted Koppel interviews three representatives from the Bush presidential campaign (see After 3:30 a.m. November 8, 2000) and none from the Gore campaign, leading to what the progressive media watchdog Web site Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) will later call a slanted report. All three Bush aides call the recount situation a “crisis” that must be resolved immediately (see Evening, November 8, 2000), deride reports of voter manipulation and minority voters denied their right to vote (see November 7, 2000), and accuse the Gore campaign of attempting to steal the election through legal maneuvering. “Koppel did not subject his guests to tough questioning,” FAIR will note. [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 11/16/2000]

In an editorial, the New York Times sounds a cautionary note about the Florida presidential election, warning both sides to avoid what it calls “scorched earth” solutions. It begins by accusing the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Al Gore, of “escalat[ing] the atmosphere of combat surrounding the presidential election results with his decision to go to court in Florida” (see November 10, 2000). The Times acknowledges that “Gore has a right as a private citizen to take his grievances to court. But he and Governor George W. Bush [the Republican candidate and apparent frontrunner] are also political figures seeking the world’s most important leadership position. Part of the test of presidential leadership, it seems to us, is finding a way to resolve electoral matters in the political arena.” The Times calls the Gore campaign’s discussion of potential lawsuits “worrying,” accuses it of a “rush to litigation,” and says the Gore campaign should not be using phrases like “constitutional crisis.” Nor should it talk about “efforts to block or cloud the vote of the Electoral College on December 18” (though Bush campaign advisors have threatened just such efforts—see November 1, 2000 and After). The Times says it agrees with CNN’s Bill Schneider that to challenge the machine tallies in Florida would be to choose a “treacherous path.” The Times acknowledges that reports of voting irregularities (see November 7, 2000, Mid-Morning, November 8, 2000, and November 9, 2000) “need to be taken seriously,” but not so much so as to question the results as already reported. To call for manual recounts or file legal challenges, the Times writes, would “paralyze… the succession process, undermine… the finality of presidential elections, and make… nervous a world that looks to the United States as a model of political stability. Neither the prospect of legal warfare nor Mr. Bush’s rush to put together a transition team is helpful at this point.” [New York Times, 11/10/2000]

In an editorial, the Washington Post castigates the Gore campaign for continuing to press for recounts in Florida. After acknowledging that George W. Bush’s lead in that state “appear[s] to have melted to fewer than 300 votes” as the recounts continue (see 5:00 p.m. November 9, 2000), and noting that for Gore to “call for as careful a count as possible in an election as close as this, with so much a stake, seems unobjectionable to us; it can only help to ensure legitimacy,” it then slams Gore campaign manager William Daley for his suggestion that Gore may file lawsuits to ask for manual recounts. Daley said, referring to the widely held belief in the Gore camp that if the votes are tallied completely, Gore would have significantly more votes than Bush, “If the will of the people is to prevail, Al Gore should be awarded a victory in Florida and be our next president.” The Post calls Daley’s remark “poisonous,” saying that Daley is attempting to imply that the Bush camp is trying to steal the election, and demands that Gore “disown” it immediately. The Post also chides Gore officials for implying, somehow, that “Gore’s narrow lead in the popular vote somehow gives him superior status—if not quite a partial claim to the office, then a greater right to contest the electoral outcome in Florida. But that’s false, and they know it. The electoral vote is what matters.” The editorial chides the Bush campaign for leaking its “transition plans” and trying to give “the impression of measuring for new curtains in the Oval Office,” as Bush has not been certified the winner of the race. “Florida hasn’t certified its results, and Mr. Bush has no more claim to the title of president-elect than the vice president. Both sides need to back off at this stage. They are risking a political war that could spread far beyond Florida, one that would be far harder to stop than to begin.” The Post concludes by advising the Gore campaign that calling for recounts is far different from filing lawsuits to force recounts; the first is acceptable, but the second “should be approached with enormous caution and restraint.” [Washington Post, 11/10/2000] In 2010, the Center for American Progress will note that Daley’s claim that Gore “should be awarded a victory in Florida and be our next president” was a claim Bush campaign lawyer James Baker “was saying pretty much every day on Bush’s behalf.” The Post does not have a similar reaction to Baker’s claims. [Center for American Progress, 12/9/2010] The same day the Post editorial is published, the New York Times publishes a piece by historian Richard Reeves that flatly falsifies presidential history in its call for Gore to abandon his post-election challenge (see November 10, 2000). The Post also publishes an editorial by former Republican Senator Bob Dole asking Gore to concede for the good of the nation (see November 11, 2000).

Historian and presidential biographer Richard Reeves fundamentally misrepresents history in a New York Times editorial asking Vice President Al Gore (D-TN) to end the Florida election standoff by conceding to George W. Bush (R-TX). Reeves notes correctly that the 1960 presidential election between Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat John F. Kennedy was extraordinarily close. Reeves asserts that Nixon and Kennedy discussed the situation after the votes were initially tallied and Nixon decided not to challenge the results. “If Nixon had decided to pursue a challenge, he might have had a good case,” Reeves writes. “Republicans were producing claims of fraud, waving sworn depositions from election officials in Illinois and Texas. It was great stuff: there were 6,138 votes cast by the 4,895 voters registered in Fannin County, Texas; in the 38th precinct of Chicago’s sixth ward, 43 voters seemed to have cast 121 votes in the hour after the polls opened. But whatever else he was, Nixon was a patriot. He understood what recounts and lawsuits and depositions carried out over months—even years—would do to the nation. He was also a realist, and he knew that investigations might well turn up examples of his own party’s tradition of recording votes for folks dead or alive in southern Illinois and a few other venues.” Reeves goes on to note that Kennedy’s slight popular vote lead translated into a strong Electoral College lead, and that Nixon’s patron, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “was angry about the alleged fraud but finally told Nixon that he could not back him in a challenge to the results.” As Nixon reportedly explained to a reporter afterwards, “The country can’t afford the agony of a constitutional crisis, and I damn well will not be a party to creating one just to become president or anything else.” Reeves uses the example of Nixon’s patriotism and restraint in arguing that Gore should emulate Nixon and gracefully concede the election. [New York Times, 11/10/2000] However, Reeves fundamentally misrepresents Nixon’s actions and historical events. Nixon was, as Reeves writes, convinced that Kennedy fraudulently won the election. And rumors of election fraud had circulated even before Election Day, such as in Chicago, where Democratic majorities were considered suspect. When the votes were tallied and Kennedy declared the winner, angry Republicans demanded an investigation. Nixon later said in both interviews and his own memoirs that he refused to dispute the election. Publicly, Nixon conceded the election to Kennedy, but privately, he encouraged his aides and fellow Republicans to overturn the results. In the weeks after the election, many newspapers pursued the story, fueled by Republicans who made a bevy of allegations and charges of election fraud and rampant cheating. Slate’s David Greenberg later writes: “[T]he Republican Party made a veritable crusade of undoing the results. Even if they ultimately failed, party leaders figured, they could taint Kennedy’s victory, claim he had no mandate for his agenda, galvanize the rank and file, and have a winning issue for upcoming elections.” Three days after the election, Senator Thruston Morton (R-KY), the chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), launched bids for recounts and investigations in 11 states, including Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey. Days later, close Nixon aides sent agents to conduct what they called “field checks” in eight of those states. Another aide tried to create a “Nixon Recount Committee” in Chicago. Recounts were indeed obtained. Grand juries were empaneled and a special prosecutor was appointed. The FBI launched investigations into voter fraud and election theft. The recounts and investigations proved nothing of significance, and one by one, they lapsed. The last recount, in Illinois, lasted for over a month after the election; on December 9, 1960, when recount tallies gave Nixon a mere 943 extra votes, Republicans filed a lawsuit in federal court to summarily grant Illinois’s 27 electoral votes to Nixon, which was dismissed. Republicans then took their case to the Illinois Board of Elections, which, even though it had a majority of Republicans comprising it, rejected the petition. Even after December 19, when the Electoral College formally certified Kennedy as the winner, recounts and legal challenges were still in the works. [Slate, 10/16/2000; Salon, 11/10/2000] Boston Globe columnist David Nyhan, considered a liberal like Reeves, echoes Reeves’s portrayal of Nixon in a column that is published the same day as Reeves’s. Nyhan calls Nixon’s supposed concession that president’s “most magnaminous act” and recommends that Gore step aside. [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 11/16/2000]

Former US Senator Bob Dole (R-KS) writes an op-ed for the Washington Post urging Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore to abandon his attempts to win the presidential election and concede the election to Republican George W. Bush. “It was a close election, but it’s over,” Dole writes. Dole begins by recalling his own experience from 1976, where Republican President Gerald Ford, with Dole as his running mate, chose not to challenge a narrow election loss to Democrat Jimmy Carter. “It took a while, but I was proud of Gerald Ford when he did the right thing by not contesting the election,” Dole writes. Dole asserts that two separate recounts have taken place [in reality, only one, a machine recount, has occurred—see November 10, 2000] and both verify Bush as the winner of the Florida vote. Instead of gracefully conceding, Dole writes, the Gore campaign is “making every effort to keep the nation divided for weeks with recounts, lawsuits, and endless politicization of the election.” Dole urges Gore “to put his country’s agenda ahead of his agenda; to put the people’s interests before his personal interests.” The American people need closure after a long presidential campaign, Dole argues, and to drag out the process “is bad for the people.” Gore “risks alienating even more Americans” by continuing to press for manual recounts. “Participation in our democracy continues to decline. More and more people are turned off by politics and are tuning out of elections. It is precisely this type of politicization that continues to disenchant people. They want leadership, not lawsuits. They need someone committed to what is good for the country, not what is good for a post election campaign.” Asking for recounts “is bad for the country.” Bush needs time to plan and execute a smooth transition into the presidency, Dole writes, time that Gore is not giving him. Bush “must begin planning his administration. He must prepare a budget and begin selecting a cabinet. He must begin meeting with world leaders and a Congress already bitterly divided. A smooth transition will help to ensure a successful presidency and a more secure and prosperous nation for the next four years.” And finally, history will look askance at Gore for being “the first presidential candidate to challenge his election defeat in the courts. The presidency should be won through inspiration, not litigation.” [Washington Post, 11/11/2000]

Richard Cohen. [Source: Washington Post]Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, a self-described moderate liberal, says that although he voted for Vice President Al Gore (D-TN) in the presidential elections, he believes that for the good of the country, Gore should stop pushing for recounts in Florida and concede the election to George W. Bush (R-TX). “I now think that under current circumstances he would not be the right man for the presidency,” he writes. “If I could, I would withdraw my vote.” Cohen says his considered opinion is based in part on the recent mob riot in Miami, where Bush campaign operatives orchestrated a violent confrontation that forced Miami-Dade County election officials to prematurely shut down their attempts to recount that county’s votes (see 9:00 a.m. and after, November 22, 2000). Cohen writes that in light of the Florida circumstances: “Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.” Cohen says that he believes Bush’s claims to be “a uniter, not a divider,” citing as proof Bush’s popularity among Republican governors, “each of whom probably thought the next president should be none other than himself.” Bush also has a reputation for affability from his days in private enterprise, Cohen writes: “I talked with one of them once, a Democrat who disagreed with Bush on many issues. Yet he, too, praised Bush’s leadership abilities, his talent for bringing order out of chaos and for reaching some sort of consensus. That man’s testimony impressed me. His disagreements with Bush were real, his admiration for him profound.” Gore is not a uniter, Cohen asserts. “His own party is sore at him for taking the one-two punch of peace and prosperity and running a race that is still not concluded. His performance was as erratic as his uniform-of-the-day: earth tones on Tuesday, business suit on Wednesday. The country sensed that either he did not know himself, or what he did know the country would not like.” Cohen calls Gore “stiff, robotic,” and appearing “insincere even when he is not… unable to mask his ambition.” Unlike Bush, he does not give the impression of being someone’s “good buddy.” Bush will rally the nation behind him, Cohen opines, where Gore is likely to further divide it. Besides, Cohen writes, having a Republican in the White House may work to “restrain… GOP Dobermans like Reps. Tom DeLay (R-TX) and J.C. Watts Jr. (R-OK),” who presumably would behave in an uncontrollable manner if a Republican is not in the White House to keep them in line. While Bush and Gore have profoundly different approaches to governance, Cohen says, “what matters at the moment is the moment itself—a mere tick of the historic clock that could, if things continue, just stop it dead where it is. History does not guarantee that things will be as they have been. The first and most daunting task of the next president is not a tax bill or a Social Security plan but—as it was when Jerry Ford succeeded Richard Nixon—the healing of the country. I voted for Gore because he was the better man for the job. I can’t help thinking that he no longer is.” [Washington Post, 11/24/2000] The liberal news Web site Consortium News writes that Cohen’s column is “[t]ypical of th[e] Democratic desire to submit to angry Republicans.… Cohen reached his conclusion although Gore has been the one to temper his rhetoric while Bush and the Republicans have escalated their public denunciations of Gore and the Florida Supreme Court.” [Consortium News, 11/24/2000]

The media reports that the Bush White House has apparently been victimized by pranks. During the last days of the Clinton administration, some Clinton officials apparently removed the “W” keys from computer keyboards in the White House and in the Old Executive Office Building, in apparent reference to incoming President George W. Bush’s middle initial. An anonymous White House aide says, “There are dozens, if not hundreds, of keyboards with these missing keys,” and adds: “In some cases the W is marked out, but the most prevalent example is the key being removed. In some cases the W keys have been taped on top of the doorways, which are 12 feet tall.” Chris Lehane, the press secretary for former vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, jokes: “My guess is that the White House did not have many reasons to use the letter W over the last couple of years. It’s possible they just fell off because of sheer atrophy.” [Los Angeles Times, 1/23/2001] Lehane laughingly tells the Washington Post, “I think the missing W’s can be explained by the vast left-wing conspiracy now at work.” [Salon, 5/23/2001] In the following days, the reports will mushroom from tales of a harmless prank into allegations of serious and systematic vandalism and theft by Clinton officials, becoming what many will call “Vandalgate,” or the “Clinton vandal scandal” (see January 26, 2001). These reports will be proven to be complete fabrications (see February 8, 2001, February 14, 2001, and May 18, 2001), apparently started by Bush officials and embellished by conservative reporters and pundits in order to besmirch the Clinton administration (see January 25, 2001).

Online columnist Rich Galen, a former Republican strategist who has numerous contacts within the new Bush administration, reports: “Vice President Dick Cheney’s staffers trying to move into the Office of the Vice President space in the Old Executive Office Building right next to the White House found the offices had been left in complete shambles by the Gore staff on its way out on Friday and Saturday (see January 23, 2001). Every cord and wire, in many offices—telephone, power, computer, and lamp—was slashed. Furniture was tossed, and trash was, literally, everywhere. One person [told Galen] that it was his understanding that Mrs. Gore [the wife of former Vice President Gore] had to phone Mrs. Cheney to apologize.” [Mullings, 1/24/2001] Conservative gossip writer Matt Drudge uses Galen’s column and his own White House sources to report that, according to a “close Bush adviser,” the damage went “way beyond pranks, to vandalism.” The Los Angeles Times soon debunks the story of the Gore apology by asking the Gores; Vice President Cheney will also say that the phone call never happened. Galen, however, insists that the apology was indeed made. [Salon, 5/23/2001]

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer says he cannot confirm the extent of the alleged vandalism carried out by Clinton staffers in the last days of the Clinton administration (see January 23, 2001). President Bush intends to change the tone in Washington to a positive one, Fleischer says, and as a result, the White House will not comment on the charges of rampant vandalism and theft. “Whether things were done that were perhaps less gracious than should have been, it is not going to be what President Bush focuses on, nor will it be what his staff focuses on,” he says. “Whatever may have been done, we are going to just put our heads down and look ahead.” [NewsMax, 1/26/2001; Guardian, 1/26/2001]Hints and Innuendos - However, the White House is “cataloguing” the damage allegedly done by Clinton staffers, Fleischer says. When asked what is being catalogued, Fleischer responds: “I choose not to. I choose not to describe what acts were done that we found upon arrival because I think that’s part of changing the tone in Washington.” Sensing more to the story, reporters hone in, asking why make a catalogue “if you’re going to give them a pass,” what the dollar estimate of damage might be, and other questions. When a reporter says, “You’ve got to blame somebody,” Fleischer cuts him off: “President Bush is not going to come to Washington for the point of blaming somebody in this town. And it’s a different way of governing, it’s a different way of leading.” When asked what he knows of the supposed apology offered to Vice President Cheney’s wife by former Vice President Gore’s wife (see January 24, 2001), Fleischer says, “I know that a phone call was made to the vice president’s office, but I really—I don’t recall who made it.” When asked where the majority of the alleged damage was, Fleischer says, “You know, I really stopped paying attention to all the different places.” Finally, when asked whether some of the damage could actually be the result of renovations and normal repairs, Fleischer says, “I don’t think that the people who were professionals, who make their business to go in and prepare a White House for new arrivals, would cut wires.” Fleischer ends the briefing, having given reporters enough hints and implications of severe, widespread vandalism to whet their appetites. [Salon, 5/23/2001]Story Fed by Fleischer, White House Officials - The allegations of vandalism and theft will prove to be almost entirely false (see February 14, 2001 and May 18, 2001). Salon will later report that while Fleischer and other White House officials publicly remain above the fray, in private they are feeding the controversy by giving detailed off-the-record interviews to selected reporters, pundits, and talk show hosts. One White House reporter will later admit that the story was pushed by at least two “unnamed Bush aides.” Salon correspondents Kerry Lauerman and Alicia Montgomery add: “Fleischer and the off-the-record Bush staffers, meanwhile, got a lot of help from a press corps eager for early scoops from a new administration. For some reporters and pundits, the White House vandalism story was just too good to pass up.” [Salon, 5/23/2001] A Washington Post report later states: “A high-level Republican who saw some of the damage said the White House was leery about putting information out about this because chief of staff Andrew Card Jr. did not want to appear to be ratting on the Clinton administration. ‘People wanted to talk about this, and Andy said no,’ an official said.” [Washington Post, 1/26/2001]Stories Debunked - It will not be long before the stories are proven almost entirely false (see February 8, 2001, February 14, 2001, and May 18, 2001).

Fed by stories from unnamed White House officials, the media reports that Air Force One was vandalized and looted by Clinton officials during the aircraft’s last trip with Clinton and former Clinton staffers on board. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell tells viewers, “The Air Force will replace Air Force One glasses and four hand towels, apparently pilfered by passengers traveling with the Clintons on their last plane ride home.” Fox’s Brit Hume says: “The raid that was conducted aboard that Air Force plane, the presidential plane, although it’s not called Air Force One because the president was no longer—Mr. Clinton, Mr. Clinton was no longer president—on the last flight to New York… was stripped bare. The plane’s porcelain, china… and silverware, and salt and pepper shakers, blankets and pillow cases, nearly all items bearing the presidential seal, were taken by Clinton staffers who went along for the ride. The Washington Times quoted a military steward as saying that even a supply of toothpaste was stolen from a compartment under a sink.” CNN’s Kate O’Beirne tells viewers: “During Bill Clinton’s final flight, the plane was stripped bare and not by sentimental staffers seeking mementos. Air Force One souvenirs were quickly posted for auction online. Why not make a final buck off the White House? Outrageous, but not surprising.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/21/2001; Salon, 5/23/2001] Weeks later, the story will be debunked by an Andrews Air Force Base spokesman (see February 8, 2001) and by President Bush himself (see February 14, 2001).

The final paragraph of Mike Allen’s Washington Post report on allegations of systematic White House vandalism carried out in the last days of the Clinton administration (see January 26, 2001) states: “Some GOP officials are portraying the damage as a sordid coda to the Clinton years. A Bush campaign official said the White House staff and Secret Service agents welcomed the Bush entourage especially warmly on Saturday. Some of the kitchen staff hugged members of the Bush family, the official said, adding, ‘You could sense an attitude like, “Thank God you’re here.”’” [Washington Post, 1/26/2001]Skepticism of Allen's Reporting - Months later, skeptical Salon reporters Kerry Lauerman and Alicia Montgomery will observe of Allen’s report, “As if the portrait of Clinton’s staff members loading their pickups with White House valuables wasn’t enough, readers were treated to the heartwarming image of a service staff grateful that their rightful rulers had returned.” Desired Effect? - Lauerman and Montgomery will report that Allen’s reporting, and the entire “vandal scandal,” apparently had its desired effect: a rise in positive media approaches to the incoming Bush administration paired with a final slap at the outgoing Clintons. Days after the Allen report, conservative media pundit and publisher William Kristol will tell Fox that the “vandal scandal” worked well for Bush and his conservative supporters: “It’s been really great for Bush to have people—and including many Gore voters, I think—just look up and think, ‘You know what? Maybe I didn’t want Bush to be president, but I am glad that Bill Clinton is gone.’” Lauerman and Alexander will write: “It couldn’t have gone better for members of the incoming Bush administration had they choreographed it themselves. And, in fact, they had” (see January 25, 2001). [Salon, 5/23/2001]

Tony Snow. [Source: Symonsez (.com)]Conservative pundit Tony Snow, who was a speechwriter for the first President Bush, alleges that Clinton aides rampaged through the White House and through Air Force One in the last days of the Clinton administration, leaving wholesale wreckage in both sites—giving Washington “one last White Trash Weekend,” he writes. The White House “was a wreck,” he alleges: “They trashed word processors, left obscene messages on voice-mail machines, cut some phone lines and re-routed others, tinkered with computers, scrawled obscenities on walls, soiled rugs and carpets, tipped over desks, vandalized file cabinets, left nasty messages for their successors—and generally went that extra mile to prove Team Clinton, for all its good and decent public servants, included a record number of punks.” Snow also repeats allegations that Air Force One was subjected to systematic theft, writing that after the presidential plane took former President Clinton and some aides to New York following the inauguration (“loaned graciously by President George W. Bush [after] Clinton insisted on the grand transport because he wanted something befitting his personal grandeur”), the aircraft “looked as if it had been stripped by a skilled band of thieves—or perhaps wrecked by a trailer park twister.” Snow alleges that many items, including silverware, porcelain dishes with the presidential seal, pillows, blankets, and even candy and toothpaste, were stolen from Air Force One by Clinton aides and perhaps the Clintons themselves. “It makes one feel grateful that the seats and carpets are bolted down,” he says. “Nothing better expresses the narcissistic tackiness of the Clinton years than the last-day exit, complete with its kangaroo-court justice, graceless self-celebration, opportunistic abuse of the gift-receiving privilege, and wanton desecration of the nation’s most important political shrine, the White House.” Snow’s assertions are contradicted by officials at Andrews Air Force Base, home of the presidential jets, who tell reporters that nothing is missing from Air Force One. Weeks later, President Bush will acknowledge that nothing was taken from Air Force One (see February 8, 2001 and February 14, 2001). [Jewish World Review, 1/26/2001; Kansas City Star, 5/18/2001] Snow also passes along allegations that the Clintons were given hundreds of thousands of dollars of illicit gifts and contributions, and that First Lady Hillary Clinton posted “a weird variation on a bridal registry, establishing password-protected sites in which contributors could pledge to purchase specific items selected in advance by the Clintons’ design teams for their his ‘n’ hers palazzos.” [Jewish World Review, 1/26/2001] As with the Air Force One allegations, the allegations of vandalism and theft, and the gift registry, will prove to be almost entirely false (see May 18, 2001).

The Bush White House alleges that officials and aides from the outgoing Clinton administration vandalized the White House in the last days before Bush officials took over. Conservative news site NewsMax reports that the “slovenly misfits” of the Clinton administration “left the [White House] in a shambles” in the transition between the outgoing Clinton administration and the incoming Bush administration. Clinton aides engaged in “deliberate vandalism,” the report says, and cites a General Services Administration (GSA) official estimating that it may cost up to $250,000 to repair the damage. NewsMax quotes a report by another conservative publication, the American Spectator, which itself quotes “an inspector… called in to assess the vandalism as saying that several executive desks were damaged to the point that they must be replaced, and several more offices must be repainted because of graffiti.” [Guardian, 1/26/2001; NewsMax, 1/26/2001] Conservative Internet gossip writer Matt Drudge reports that “White House offices [were] left ‘trashed’” and so-called “[p]orn bombs [and] lewd messages” were left behind. No explanation of what Drudge meant by the “porn bomb” allegation is ever given. [Chicago Sun-Times, 1/27/2001] The allegations of vandalism and theft will prove to be almost entirely false (see February 8, 2001, February 14, 2001, and May 18, 2001). Gore's Staffers Charged with Worst of Vandalism - British newspaper The Guardian repeats earlier claims that the worst of the damage was found in offices once occupied by staffers for former Vice President Al Gore, and that Gore’s wife, Tipper, has phoned Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, to apologize for the damage. The story is false (see January 24, 2001). [Guardian, 1/26/2001]Reports: Cut Phone Lines, Extensive Damage, Pornographic Photos - Both the Washington Post and The Guardian report allegations that computer and telephone lines were “sliced,” voice-mail messages were changed to “obscene remarks and lewd greetings,” desks were overturned, and trash strewn throughout the premises. The reports add that filing cabinets were glued shut with Superglue, pornographic photographs displayed in printers, and “filthy graffiti scrawled on at least one hallway wall.” The Spectator’s inspector adds that “[e]ntire computer keyboards will have to be replaced because the damage to them is more extensive than simply missing keys,” referring to allegations that some White House keyboards had the “W” keys pried off. The Spectator also reports tales of former Clinton staffers reportedly “laughing and giggling about the mess their former colleagues left behind.” A Bush White House official calls the White House “a pigsty” in the aftermath of the transition. “The Gore and Clinton people didn’t ‘clean out’ the place because there was nothing clean about what they did before they left.” The GSA will pursue the former Clinton officials for reimbursement and expenses. The Spectator reports that “investigators” conclude the damage was “the result of a carefully organized campaign of vandalism unlike anything ever seen in the aftermath of a presidential transition.” [NewsMax, 1/26/2001; Guardian, 1/26/2001; Washington Post, 1/26/2001] The New York Daily News reports, “The destruction was so vast that a telecommunications staffer with more than a quarter-century of service was seen sobbing near his office one night last week.” [New York Daily News, 1/27/2001] CNN’s Paula Zahn observes: “All right, but this is the White House, for God’s sakes. We’re not talking about people living in a fraternity.” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/21/2001] Fox News is particularly vehement in its coverage. “They trash[ed] the place,” says Fox commentator Sean Hannity. ”$200,000 in furniture [was] taken out.” Fellow Fox commentator Oliver North (see May-June, 1989) adds: “We should expect from white trash what they did at the White House.… I recommend that what the Bush White House do is peel the wallpaper off that they defaced with their graffiti and ship it off to the Clinton Library so people can see it.” Fox host Bill O’Reilly says, “I mean, the price tag right now is about $200,000, so that’s a felony right there.” And O’Reilly guest Tom Schatz says, referring to the famous film about fraternity life, “They turned it into Animal House.” [Knight Ridder, 2/8/2001; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 5/21/2001]Air Force One 'Stripped Bare,' Reports Claim - The Guardian also reports that during former President Clinton’s last trip in Air Force One, the presidential jet was subjected to what it calls “an orgy of pilfering” (see January 25-27, 2001). It was “stripped bare” by aides, who reportedly took china, silverware, salt and pepper shakers, and other items, most bearing the presidential seal. [Guardian, 1/26/2001] On Fox, Hannity charges, “They strip[ped] Air Force One of the china and everything else that wasn’t bolted down.” [Knight Ridder, 2/8/2001]Clinton Officials Admit to 'Pranks,' Bush Officials Allege Attempts at Theft - Clinton and Gore officials deny the reports of vandalism, but admit to carrying out pranks such as removing the “W” keys and affixing satirical signs to office doors that read, “Office of Strategery,” “Office of Subliminable Messages,” and “Division of Uniting.” A former Clinton official says, “It’s childish, but it’s also funny.” However, a senior Bush official accuses Clinton staffers of attempting to steal White House paintings and official seals from doors, and attempting to have those items shipped to themselves; Bush officials have ordered that all packages leaving the White House be X-rayed. [Washington Post, 1/26/2001]Bush Aide Documenting Damages - A Bush White House aide has been delegated to document the vandalism, videos are being taken of the damages, and White House officials are being interviewed. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer has confirmed that the administration is reviewing reports of the alleged vandalism. [NewsMax, 1/26/2001] Bush himself downplays the reports, saying: “There might have been a prank or two, maybe somebody put a cartoon on the wall, but that’s okay. It’s time now to move forward.” [New York Daily News, 1/27/2001]

Former President Clinton asks aides to investigate reports of vandalism alleged to have been perpetrated by outgoing members of his staff (see January 25-27, 2001 and January 26, 2001). If warranted, Clinton says he and his former officials will “make amends.” Clinton spokesman Jake Siewert says that Bush officials declined to allow Clinton officials to examine the reported damage: “We made an offer to go over and survey what was done—take a look and see if we can make amends. We asked to take a look at the damage and offered to try to sort it out. They said that it was isolated incidents and that that would not be necessary.” [Los Angeles Times, 1/30/2001] The allegations of vandalism and theft will prove to be almost entirely false (see February 8, 2001, February 14, 2001, and May 18, 2001).

Media stories that President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton accepted an inappropriate amount of gifts in the final days of the Clinton administration prove to be false. NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell led the story, claiming that Clinton supporters gave the first family approximately $190,027 of gifts, mostly to furnish their new homes. Mitchell incorrectly implied that Hillary Clinton accepted much of the gifts after she was elected US Senator for New York, but before she was sworn in, enabling her to duck the Senate’s ban on expensive gifts. The reality is less sensational. Some of the gifts were given as long ago as 1993, but were not listed until 2001, and most of the gifts that supposedly went to decorate the Clintons’ homes actually reside in the White House Museum collections, donated by the Clintons. [Salon, 1/31/2001]

Conservative columnist John Derbyshire writes a column for the National Review claiming that many racial and ethnic stereotypes are not only accurate, they are socially desirable and useful. Derbyshire claims that “[a]nthropology, psychology, sociology, and genetics are all” proving “that human nature is much more like what conservatives have always said it was like than it is like what leftists have believed.” Derbyshire cites a single source, the widely discredited book The Bell Curve, which purported to show that non-whites were genetically and intellectually inferior to whites, to prove his claim, before segueing into the main portion of his column, which focuses on a 1995 book called Stereotype Accuracy: Toward Appreciating Group Differences. Written by three academics and published by the American Psychological Association, Derbyshire claims that the book proves cultural, racial, and ethnic stereotyping is based largely on fact. He writes of the book’s central thesis, “Far from being a loathsome aberration that ought to be purged from our behavior, it turns out that stereotypes are essential life tools, are accurate much more often than not, and that we do not use them as much as, from cold practical considerations, we should.” Derbyshire grants that stereotypes do not always apply to individuals in a group, citing the examples of “lazy Mexicans” and “unwashed French” as sometimes untrue. However, he writes, stereotypes do not usually exaggerate group tendencies. In fact, he claims, “more often the opposite is true.” The negative stereotypes held by white Americans about African-Americans “are generally accurate,” he claims, “and where they are inaccurate, they always under-estimate a negative characteristic.” His proof: a 1978 survey stating that 21 percent of African-American families are headed by a woman, while another survey found that white Americans estimate that number at between 8 and 12 percent. Stereotypes about racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious groups, he writes, are “useful tools for dealing with the world.” Derbyshire cites the single dissenting voice quoted in the book, the University of Maryland’s Charles Stangor, and implies that Stangor’s criticisms are centered in a desire to reshape society to his own preferences as Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin reshaped Germany and Russia, respectively. “It is highly characteristic of political ideologues,” Derbyshire writes, “that they believe ‘improving the social condition’ can have only one possible meaning—theirs.” Derbyshire concludes that “the Left” “hates humanity and seeks to wage war against human nature,” and only leftists would argue that stereotyping others is wrong. [National Review, 2/1/2001] Two weeks later, Derbyshire will “humorously” advocate the murder of Chelsea Clinton, President Clinton’s daughter, in order to eradicate the Clinton bloodline (see February 15, 2001). In late 2003, Derbyshire will describe himself as “a racist, though… a mild and tolerant one” (see November 11-18, 2003).

Knight Ridder is the first newspaper publisher to express public skepticism over White House and media reports of the Clinton “vandal scandal,” which allege that Clinton staffers vandalized and looted the White House and Air Force One in the last days of the Clinton administration (see January 25, 2001 and January 26, 2001). “It was a news story that had a lot going for it,” Knight Ridder correspondent David Goldstein writes, “except on-the-record sources and many hard facts.” Goldstein calls the “vandal scandal” reporting “an example of post-election political warfare waged on a slapstick level” and “clearly a sample of how journalism in Washington is practiced in the age of the 24-hour news cycle and its unceasing demand for information, sometimes regardless of the provenance.” Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism says, “The dirty little secret of the information revolution is often there’s not a lot of verification.” Earlier in the week, US News and World Report printed a story alleging that the White House is spending $10,000 a day repairing the White House telephone system after it was damaged by Clinton staffers, but a White House spokesman responded, “I can’t find any supporting evidence” of that charge. “No one can confirm it.” As for allegations that Clinton staffers looted Air Force One (see January 25-27, 2001), Lieutenant Colonel Dana Carroll of Andrews Air Force Base, which houses the presidential jet, says: “The public was misinformed. There was no china or anything like that missing.” Carroll says the only items missing from Air Force One after the Clintons’ final trip was a tray of 15 glasses, which Clinton staffers say broke during a moment of turbulence; reporters on the aircraft saw the glasses fall and break. Former Clinton strategist James Carville says the reports are little more than efforts to smear Clinton. “It just seems to be like everything else that happens to this president,” he says. Referring to the Whitewater investigations, Carville adds, “Next they’ll be calling for an independent counsel, bring back Ken Starr to investigate this.” House Republican Bob Barr (R-GA) is asking that the General Accounting Office investigate the story (see May 18, 2001). [Knight Ridder, 2/8/2001] In July, Goldstein will call the “vandal scandal” stories “questionable from the beginning.” [American Journalism Review, 7/2001]

President Bush tells reporters that Air Force One was not looted and/or vandalized by Clinton staffers, as reports have alleged (see January 25-27, 2001 and January 26, 2001). “I will tell you one thing, just in terms of the former president,” he says. “All the allegations that they took stuff off of Air Force One is simply not true, for example.” Bush says he was told by Air Force One’s chief steward that the stories were false. [Salon, 2/14/2001] Bush’s statement follows confirmation by an Andrews Air Force Base spokesman that nothing had been stolen from Air Force One (see February 8, 2001).

The US House Committee on Energy and Commerce holds a hearing on the news networks’ election night decision to project George W. Bush the winner of the Florida election, and thereby the winner of the US presidential election (see November 7-8, 2000). One of the matters at hand is Fox News’s choice to have its election night coverage anchored by John Prescott Ellis, President Bush’s cousin and an intensely partisan Bush supporter (see October-November 2000). The chairman of the committee is W.J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-LA). Opening Statements - In his opening statement, Tauzin tells the assemblage that the hearing is to “give us a real sense of what went wrong in terms of the election night coverage of the presidential election of November 2000.” He notes that news coverage issues have been raised in every election since the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election. Early calls—the practice of news outlets to “call,” or project, winners in states before elections in other states have closed—have long been acknowledged as having a “deletorious” effect on voting, and the use of “exit polling”—polls of voters taken outside polling booths—have proven both “valuable” and “dangerous.” Voter News Service (VNS), the independent consortium that provided polling and other data to the networks and press agencies for their use during their election coverage, uses exit polling to help those news outlets “project” winners in races. Tauzin spends much of his opening statement attacking VNS and the use of exit polling as the “source” of the election night dissension, and says that on the whole, VNS data “produces statistical biases in favor of Democrats in this case today and against Republicans, that the statistical flaws tend to overstate the Democratic vote in the exit poll and understate the Republican vote.” Tauzin says that investigations have “discovered no evidence of intentional bias, no evidence of intentional slanting of this information,” and instead says the entire problem rests with VNS and its use of exit polling data. In their opening statements, many Republicans echo Tauzin’s remarks. Ranking minority member John Dingell (D-MI) calls the election night coverage “a monumental screw-up which I think has embarrassed an awful lot of people.” Dingell repeats Tauzin’s claim that no evidence of intentional bias has been found—calling such allegations “inflammatory”—and says that the focus of future hearings should be on the issue of voter disenfranchisement. Having said all that, he goes on to say that the networks’ decision to call Florida for Bush in the early hours of November 8, 2000 was premature, and lent itself to later allegations that attempts by Democratic challenger Al Gore were baseless and troublesome. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) accuses the networks of trying to influence Florida voters in the Panhandle, a traditionally Republican stronghold, by prematurely calling the state for Gore eight minutes before polls closed in that region. In questioning, Sherrod Brown (D-OH) notes the almost-immediate appearance of the “Sore Loserman” campaign (derived from the names of the Democratic candidates, Gore and Joe Lieberman), which attempted, successfully, to paint attempts by the Gore campaign to force vote recounts as attempts to “steal” the election. Focus on Fox - Henry Waxman (D-CA) is the first to mention Fox News. He reads from a Los Angeles Times editorial, quoting: “Suppose that a first cousin of Al Gore had been running one of the network news teams issuing election night projections. Suppose that having previously recused himself from a columnist job saying his objectivity would suffer from family loyalty, this cousin had chatted with Gore six times on Election Day. Suppose the same cousin had been the first to declare Gore as the winner in Florida on election night, helping coax the rival networks to follow suit, leading George W. Bush to call up Gore in order to concede, thereby helping to create that Gore was the duly elected president of the United States long before all the votes had been counted. Can anybody reasonably doubt that the pundits would be working themselves into a nonstop lather charging the liberal media as accessories to grand larceny? Can we imagine, say, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox news channel right-leaning heads dropping the subject?” Waxman says this was absolutely the case, but with Fox News and John Ellis, not Gore and an imaginary Gore cousin at another network. “[O]f everything that happened on election night this was the most important in impact. It created a presumption that George Bush won the election. It set in motion a chain of events that were devastating to Al Gore’s chances and it immeasurably helped George Bush maintain the idea in people’s minds than he was the man who won the election.” Several other Democrats echo Waxman’s statements. Issues with Florida Election Practices - Peter Deutsch (D-FL) cites issues of rampant voter disenfranchisement of African-Americans, a traditionally Democratic voting bloc, with over 100,000 ballots, mostly from African-American voters, apparently not counted. Deutsch says flatly that “there is no question, it is no longer debatable that if the vote in Florida were counted, Al Gore would be president of the United States.” Bobby Rush (D-IL) cites a large number of incidents where minority group voters were “harassed by police departments” in Florida and in other states besides. In many instances these voters were stopped from voting entirely; in others, their votes were not counted. Other Democrats, such as Eliot Engel (D-NY), echo Deutsch’s and Rush’s concerns; Engel says: “Al Gore was not the only one who lost that night. The American people lost that night, and the news media also lost that night.” Testimony regarding Independent Review of Election Night Coverage - The first witness is Joan Konner, a professor of journalism at Columbia. Konner led a panel commissioned by CNN “to look at what went wrong in [CNN’s] television coverage of the presidential election 2000.” Her panel submitted a report on the election night coverage to CNN, and CNN provided that report to the committee. “[S]omething went terribly wrong,” she says. “CNN executives, correspondents, and producers themselves describe election night coverage as a debacle, a disaster, and a fiasco; and in our report we agree.” She blames the problems with CNN’s coverage on “excessive speed and hypercompetition, combined with overconfidence in experts and a reliance on increasingly dubious polls. We have stated that the desire to be first or at least not to be consistently behind the others led the networks to make calls unwisely based on sketchy and sometimes mistaken information.” The choice to create, fund, and use VNS by all the networks was primarily a cost-cutting decision, she says, but that choice was a mistake: “Relying on a single source eliminates the checks and balances built into a competitive vote-gathering and vote system. It eliminates the possibility of a second source for validating key and possible conflicting information.” Another member of the panel, James Risser of Stanford University, notes that the report’s findings apply equally to other networks along with CNN. Media Panel - After much questioning of the CNN panel, a second panel is sworn in. This panel includes: Fox News chairman Roger Ailes; CBS president Andrew Heyward; CNN chairman Tom Johnson; NBC president Andrew Lack; ABC president David Westin; VNS director Ted Savaglio; VNS editorial director Murray Edelman; and the Associated Press’s president, Louis Boccardi. In an opening statement, Savaglio admits that VNS made “errors” in vote tabulation and predictives based on “flaws” in the statistical analyses. Two major errors were made on election night, Savaglio says, the first leading to the incorrect awarding of Florida to Gore early in the evening, and the second provision of data that indicated Bush had a statistically insurmountable lead in Florida that did not include an accurate tabulation of votes cast in Volusia County as well as errors in other county tabulations and estimates. Boccardi says that the Associated Press used VNS-provided data in the erroneous Gore projection, but “takes full responsibility” for the error. The Associated Press did not join in with the second, Fox News-led projection of Bush’s victory. “[T]he race was too close to call” at that point, he says. “It would be right to surmise that the pressure on AP at that moment [to join the networks in calling the election for Bush] was enormous.” Heyward testifies that CBS, like CNN, hired an independent panel to assess its election coverage, and has a number of improvements to be made for future coverage. “Our method of projecting winners, one that, as you have heard, has produced only six bad calls in over 2,000 races since the 1960s, failed us this time; and as a well-known candidate would say, failed us big time in the very state that held the key to this election,” he says. He also notes that charges by Republican committee members that there is an inherent bias in the statistical models against Republicans “has been rejected by every single outside expert who examined each of the networks, even those experts, and you heard from them today, who are the most highly critical of us.” Lack asks why there was not more media coverage and examination of other voting-related problems, from “ineffective voting machines” and “confusing ballots” to allowing felons to vote. Ailes's Statement - Ailes blames VNS for Fox’s “mistakes” in its reporting, saying: “As everyone knows, Voter News Service, a consortium with a good track record, gave out bad numbers that night. In the closest race in history the wheels apparently came off a rattle trap computer system which we relied on and paid millions for.” He claims, “Through our self-examination and investigation we have determined that there was no intentional political favoritism in play on election night on the part of Fox News.” Ailes does not mention his choice to use Ellis as Fox’s election night anchor in his verbal statement, but in a written statement he submits to the committee, he says that Ellis was not the person who made the final decision to declare Florida for Bush. The news division’s vice president, John Moody, made the final call. As for hiring Ellis, he praises Ellis’s professionalism and experience, and writes: “We at Fox News do not discriminate against people because of their family connections. I am more than happy to give you examples of offspring of famous politicians who are employed at Fox News.” He also says that he was aware that Ellis was speaking to both George W. and Jeb Bush throughout the night, and writes: “Obviously, through his family connections, Mr. Ellis has very good sources. I do not see this as a fault or shortcoming of Mr. Ellis. Quite the contrary, I see this as a good journalist talking to his very high level sources on election night.” Though Ellis has freely admitted to sharing VNS data with both Bushes, Ailes writes, “Our investigation of election night 2000 found not one shred of evidence that Mr. Ellis revealed information to either or both of the Bush brothers which he should not have, or that he acted improperly or broke any rules or policies of either Fox News or VNS.” He concludes: “[I]n my heart I do believe that democracy was harmed by my network and others on November 7, 2000. I do believe that the great profession of journalism took many steps backward.” Questioning the Media Representatives - Almost immediately, Ailes raises the question of skewed exit polling that appears to favor Democrats, though experts have refuted these claims in just-given testimony, and Savaglio has just said that exit polls exhibit no such bias. Ailes tells the panel: “I do know that when Republicans come out of polls and you ask them a question they tend to think it’s none of your business and Democrats want to share their feelings. So you may get some bias there that is inadvertent, just because it’s a cultural thing and unless you send the Republicans to sensitivity training you’re not going to get them to do that.” Tauzin says that a study of VNS results tends to bear out Ailes’s claim. Westin says if there is bias in exit polling, it cuts both ways, an observation with which Tauzin also agrees. Savaglio admits that after midnight, VNS provided substantially inaccurate information to the networks that led them to conclude Bush had a slight but insurmountable lead in Florida. Lack denies the rumor that Jack Welch, the CEO of NBC’s parent company General Electric, made the decision for NBC News to follow Fox’s lead in declaring Bush the presumptive winner in Florida. Waxman accepts Lack’s denial, but notes that he has been told Welch’s command to declare Bush the winner is preserved on videotape, “filmed by NBC’s advertising and promotions department.” Lack says if the tape exists, he will provide it to the committee. Bart Stupak (D-MI) asks the representatives directly if they believe any bias towards one party or another exists in their networks’ coverage, and all answer strongly in the negative. Heyward says that rumors of networks such as his trying to “slant” their coverage to give the idea of an “inevitable” Gore victory are entirely negative, and says: “[C]ertainly we displayed the popular vote graphic 15 times between 7 and 11. President Bush was ahead every single time; on the electoral count, 75 out of
100 times.… The video [shown by the commission at the beginning of the hearing] that gave the impression that the networks were saying Gore’s got it in the bag I believe was misleading, yes.” Westin agrees with Heyward, and says the networks generally gave the impression of “a much more balanced, much closer race throughout the night.” Under questioning by Gene Green (D-TX), Ailes contradicts previously presented evidence and says no one at the election desk, Ellis or anyone else, was in contact with “Austin” (meaning the Bush campaign and George W. Bush personally) at all that night. [House of Representatives, Committee on Energy and Commerce, 2/14/2001]

John Derbyshire. [Source: John Derbyshire]National Review columnist John Derbyshire “satirically” advocates the murder of Chelsea Clinton, the only daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton, in order to stamp out the Clinton bloodline once and for all. Former President Clinton has left the White House, to spend the rest of his life “goosing waitresses [and] defending himself in court.” Hillary “has no future beyond the US Senate… [she is] maxed out.” But, he warns, “Clintonism may yet rise again.… On February 27th, Chelsea Clinton will turn 21.” 'I Hate Chelsea Clinton' - Derbyshire confesses: “I hate Chelsea Clinton. I admit it’s not easy to justify my loathing of this person. I can pick out causes, but none of them is one hundred per cent rational.… I admit, I hate Chelsea because she is a Clinton.” After noting the negative reactions to his previous attack on the younger Clinton’s physical appearance, he acknowledges that she hasn’t committed the “array of crimes” her father is allegedly responsible for, but “she doesn’t deserve any credit for not having done these things; she just hasn’t had time yet.” He writes that since she was 18, she has “sign[ed] on to the Great Clinton Project. Which is, has always been, and forever will be, to enrich the family from the public fisc, and to lie, bomb, bribe, and intimidate your way out of trouble when necessary.” 'Sippenhaft' - Derbyshire notes that in totalitarian societies of the past, many people were executed merely because of their family connections, and says the same should be considered for Chelsea Clinton. “Chelsea is a Clinton,” he writes. “She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past—I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble—recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people.’ The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability.’ In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.… We don’t, of course, institutionalize such principles in our society, and a good thing too. Our humanity and forbearance, however, has a cost. The cost is that the vile genetic inheritance of Bill and Hillary Clinton may live on to plague us in the future. It isn’t over, folks.” [National Review, 2/15/2001]'Hysterical Idiots' - After a week of angry criticism, Derbyshire will write a column defending his original column as “satire,” blaming “liberals” for “missing the joke,” and admitting his column “wasn’t meant to be a thigh-slapper. I had a point to make: There could be another Clinton in our future, and on present evidence (admittedly rather scant), it would be a chip off the old block. That’s fair comment. However, my tone was partly tongue in cheek.… Humor and irony are especially tricky.” He asks, rhetorically, if he intends to apologize, and answers himself: “In your dreams. I make it a point of principle never to apologize to hysterical idiots.” [National Review, 2/22/2001]

Conservative media pundit Bill O’Reilly tells his listeners, “You know, I don’t take Saddam Hussein all that seriously anymore as far as a world threat. Maybe I’m wrong and naive here. Should we be very frightened of this guy?” [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), 5/2003]

The Daily Californian, the newspaper for the University of California at Berkeley, runs a full-page ad from conservative pundit David Horowitz calling the idea of “reparations” for the African-American descendants of slaves “racist.” Horowitz, a UC-Berkeley graduate, had attempted to persuade a number of college newspapers to run the ad on February 28, the last day of Black History Month. The ad, entitled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea—and Racist, Too,” says that reparations to African-Americans “have already been paid,” and asks, “What about the debt blacks owe to America?” The ad claims that blacks are themselves responsible for slavery and should accept this “fact.” The day after publishing the ad, the Daily Californian, responding to a harsh public outcry, apologizes for running the advertisement and writes that it allowed itself to “become an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry.” The UC-Davis newspaper also runs the ad, and also issues an apology. Many other California and Ivy League universities also receive the ad, but refuse to run it. [Daily Californian, 3/2/2001; Media Matters, 12/1/2004] Robert Chrisman, editor in chief of the journal Black Scholar, and Ernest Allen Jr., a professor of African-American studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, respond to Horowitz’s ad in an essay published by the university’s African-American Studies department. They write in part: “While Horowitz’s article pretends to address the issues of reparations, it is not about reparations at all. It is, rather, a well-heeled, coordinated attack on black Americans, which is calculated to elicit division and strife.… As one examines the text of Horowitz’s article, it becomes apparent that it is not a reasoned essay addressed to the topic of reparations: it is, rather, a racist polemic against African-Americans and Africans that is neither responsible nor informed, relying heavily upon sophistry and a Hitlerian ‘Big Lie’ technique.” [University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 3/1/2001] Horowitz publishes the ad on his Web publication Front Page Magazine, but will later delete it. It will be chronicled in a 2004 article by progressive media watchdog organization Media Matters. [Media Matters, 12/1/2004]

The Christian Defense Coalition (CDC) urges the Bush administration to show “restraint” in its handling of the arrest of accused murderer James Kopp, whose anti-abortion beliefs triggered his shooting of Dr. Barnett Slepian (see March 29, 2001). The CDC says that the “vast majority of the pro-life community” condemns violence against abortion doctors such as Slepian, and urges Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Department of Justice “not to use this episode to harass and intimidate the pro-life movement as the Clinton administration did” (see May 1994 and January 1996), and makes the same request of pro-choice organizations. The CDC also urges the general public to remember that Kopp is “innocent until proven guilty.” [Christian Defense Coalition, 3/29/2001]

DVD cover illustration of the film ‘Soldiers in the Army of God.’ [Source: HBO / St. Pete for Peace]Cable movie provider HBO airs a documentary, Soldiers in the Army of God, focusing on the violent anti-abortion movement (see 1982, Early 1980s, August 1982, and July 1988) and three of its leaders. National Public Radio airs a profile of the documentary, featuring an interview with the film’s producers, Marc Levin, Daphne Pinkerson, and Daniel Voll. According to Voll, the film focuses on three members of the “Army of God”: young recruit Jonathan O’Toole, who says he was looking for the most “radical” and “terroristic” anti-abortion group he could find; Neal Horsley, who runs an anti-abortion Web site; and long-haul trucker Bob Lokey, who recruits new members. 'Violent Fringe' of Anti-Abortion Opposition - Voll describes the three as part of the “violent fringe” of anti-abortion opposition: “These are the guys on the ground who are—whatever the words that politicians and other leaders of these cultural wars can put out there, these are the men who hear them and feel emboldened by them, who feel encouraged by each other, and they are every day praying for God’s will in their life.” Another unidentified man says: “Anybody who raises a weapon up against these people who are slaughtering these babies, before God and the entire world, right now I say you are doing God’s own work. And may the power of God be with you as you aim that rifle. You’re squeezing that trigger for Almighty God.” In the documentary, an unidentified anti-abortion activist says: “There are people in this world right now who are looking for directions on what do we do. Well, we end abortion on demand by the most direct means available to us. So stop the abortion with a bullet, if that’s what it takes. Stop it with a bomb, if that’ s what it takes. You stop abortion on demand. Don’t let it go any farther.” O’Toole says that the “next step is to arm ourselves in a militia, a real militia that has the power to resist the federal government.” Pinkerson says that O’Toole, who was 19 when he joined the Army of God, found Horsley on the Internet through Horsley’s Web site, “The Nuremberg Files,” which lists doctors who perform abortions (see January 1997). O’Toole became Horsley’s assistant, and through him met Lokey, who runs a Web site called “Save the Babies.” In the film, O’Toole, whom the producers speculate may eventually become an assassin of abortion providers, says that because of America’s legalization of abortion, the country has become like “Nazi Germany. It’s like you’ve got concentration camps around you.” Levin notes that filmed conversations between Horsley and Lokey show that many in the movement feel threatened by the concept of women’s equality, and blame men’s failure to exert “dominion” over women as part of the reason why the US legalized abortion. [National Public Radio, 3/30/2001; Womens eNews, 3/30/2001]Opposition to Homosexuality - Horsley draws a connection between the organization’s opposition to abortion and the American citizenry’s supposed opposition to homosexuality, saying: “If the American people woke up, and realized that they had to choose between legalized abortion, legalized homosexuality, and legalized all the rest of the desecration or civil war which would cause the rivers to run red with blood—hey, you know we will see legalized abortion go like that! We’ll see legalized homosexuality go like that! Because the American people are not willing to die for homosexuals.” Bringing Bomb-Making Materials to Washington - The film also shows Lokey bragging to convicted clinic bomber Michael Bray (see September 1994) that he has just trucked 45,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, a substance that can be used to make “fertilizer bombs” similar to the one that destroyed an Oklahoma City federal building (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995), into Washington, DC. Anti-Abortion Opposition Part of an 'Apocalyptic' Death Struggle - Author and reporter Frederick Clarkson writes: “At once shocking, compelling, and beautifully made, the film is essentially the national television debut for the aboveground spokesmen and spokeswomen of the Army of God.… Horsley and others are quite clear in their public statements and their writings that the attacks on clinics and the murders of doctors are but warning shots in what they envision as an epochal, even an apocalyptic struggle at hand. Either Americans conform to their view of God’s laws, or there will be a blood bath, they say. And there is no evidence that they are anything but dead serious.” [Womens eNews, 3/30/2001]

The White House fails to produce the documentation it says it has compiled on the so-called Clinton “vandal scandal,” the allegations that Clinton staffers looted and vandalized the White House, Air Force One, and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, in the last days of the Clinton administration (see January 26, 2001). As a result, the General Accounting Office (GAO) is unable to pursue an investigation of the allegations as requested by Bush officials. In January, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters that the White House was compiling a “catalogue” of damages and missing items; in recent days, Fleischer has said that no actual list was being documented, but instead White House staffers (or a single staffer, Fleischer is unclear) were keeping track of the damages “in their heads.” In a letter responding to the GAO’s March request for details about “damage that may have been deliberately caused” by the Clinton administration, Phillip Larsen, a special assistant to the president, tells GAO official Bernard Ungar: “After investigation, we have located no such record. And our repair records do not contain information that would allow someone to determine the cause of the damage that is being repaired.” [Knight Ridder, 6/4/2001]

Victoria “Torie” Clarke joins the Defense Department. She is a public relations specialist who served as press secretary for President George H. W. Bush’s 1992 re-election campaign, worked closely with Senator John McCain (R-AZ), and was an Assistant US Trade Representative during the first Bush’s presidency. In the private sector, she was president of Bozell Eskew Advertising, Vice President of the National Cable Telecommunications Association, and the Washington director for the PR firm of Hill & Knowlton, the firm so heavily involved in promoting and selling the 1991 Gulf War (see January 16, 1991 and After). She brings strong ideas to her new position about achieving what she calls “information dominance” in both the domestic and foreign “markets” (see February 2003). She directs what John Stauber, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, calls the “twin towers of propaganda” for the Pentagon: “embedding news media with the troops, and embedding military propagandists into the TV media” (see April 20, 2008 and Early 2002 and Beyond). [Stennis Center for Public Service, 8/17/2007; New York Times, 4/20/2008; Bill Berkowitz, 5/10/2008]

The General Services Administration (GSA) reports that there was no truth to assertions that Clinton White House officials had vandalized the White House before departing in January 2001. Bush White House officials made those assertions in January (see January 25, 2001), claims which were picked up on and embellished by conservative talk radio hosts and other media reporters (see January 25-27, 2001 and January 26, 2001). The GSA investigated the claims at the request of House Representative Bob Barr (R-GA). Normal Wear and Tear, Pranks Found - The GSA report finds that nothing unusual had occurred during the transition from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. “The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy,” the GSA report finds. Although some pranks were found to have taken place—“W” keys removed from computer keyboards and signs reading “Office of Strategery” placed on office doors, for example—none of the other alleged actions took place. No Evidence for Allegations of Vandalism - No computers, copiers, or telephones were destroyed; no lewd graffiti or pornographic images were pasted to walls or displayed on computer monitors. Nothing was stolen either from the White House or from Air Force One, as many reports had insisted (see February 8, 2001 and February 14, 2001). Attempt to Smear Clinton Administration? - Harvard University’s Alex Jones says: “I think it was this calculated effort to plant a damaging story. There was a sort of fertile ground for believing anything bad.” The General Accounting Office’s Bernard Unger, director for physical infrastructure, says of the GSA investigation, “They told me that there were papers that were not organized lying on the floor and on desks; there were some scratches here and there, but the bottom line was they didn’t see anything really in their view that was significant and that would appear to some as real extensive damage.” Clinton aide Mark Lindsay, who oversaw the transition between the Clinton and Bush administration, says he is pleased that the GSA has set the record straight. “Because of President Clinton, this was one of the smoothest transitions in the history of the presidency,” he says. “This was nothing more than just lies.” Conservative pundit Tony Snow, one of the harshest critics of the Clinton administration over the so-called “vandal scandal” (see January 26, 2001), says, “I’m perfectly willing to admit my error on the aircraft,” but insists that the information he disseminated about vandalism and wholesale theft at the White House was true. “What often happens in Washington is gossip becomes news,” he notes. “That’s not a good thing.” [Kansas City Star, 5/18/2001; New York Times, 5/19/2001] Former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta says: “Certainly people inside the [Bush] administration fed this story. At least they got what they wanted out of it.” [Salon, 5/23/2001]

Of all the media outlets that pushed the false Clinton “vandal scandal” story (see January 26, 2001), only Fox News immediately offers a true retraction. Fox had been at the forefront of repeating, and embellishing, reports of vandalism and theft carried out by Clinton staffers in the last days of their administration. After the General Services Administration (GSA) reports that none of the reports were true (see May 18, 2001), Fox acknowledges on the air that its reporting had been false. Two days later, Fox News Sunday host Tony Snow, who had accused the Clinton staffers of vandalizing and looting Air Force One (see January 26, 2001), admits his error. “OK, I’m sorry,” Snow says. “The ex-president’s pals have a legitimate beef.” Other media outlets, including NBC News, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, fail to report on the GSA report, or to acknowledge their own errors in spreading the tales. [Salon, 5/23/2001] The Washington Post does eventually report, briefly, on the GSA findings, as do some other newspapers, and Post ombudsman Michael Getler will later write, “The use of a brief news service account rather than a well-displayed, staff-written story about the GSA findings tells me that the readers who complained have better news judgment than the editors.” [American Journalism Review, 7/2001]

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer backs off of previous claims that Clinton administration officials vandalized the White House, and stole all manner of items, during the January 2001 transition between the Clinton and Bush administrations (see January 26, 2001). A General Services Administration report found the allegations virtually without merit (see May 18, 2001). Fleischer is asked about the report, and about his allegations that Bush officials had made a “catalogue” of the vandalism and theft that apparently does not exist. Fleischer now says that he had attempted to “knock… down” reports of alleged vandalism “and draw everybody back and away from this story because it was not something the White House was pursuing.” Fleischer continues: “And I indicated that there was no investigation going on, because there wasn’t. I said, if anything, somebody is cataloguing this. And the next day I further explained that meant that somebody was just keeping mental track of what was taking place. There were no written records about it all. But they were keeping on eye on and noting what did take place as this administration came into office.… The General Services Administration contacted the White House recently and asked if there were any written records of what took place. And just as I indicated, because there were no written records, the White House informed the General Services Administration that we had no written records to provide them. And I think that’s what their report indicated, the White House did not provide them any written records because there were none. Which is what I indicated at the time.” Fleischer says the White House intends “not to live in the past” and focus on “things that took place as this administration entered office…” [White House, 5/22/2001] Fleischer fails to acknowledge that it was his hints and innuendos to the White House press corps that encouraged the story to spread (see January 25, 2001).

In the aftermath of the General Services Administration’s report that the Clinton “vandal scandal” never happened (see May 18, 2001), some wonder how involved the Bush administration was in pushing the falsehoods onto the press—and how willing the press was to run with the juicy, but baseless, allegations. Former Clinton press secretary Jake Siewert says: “The media left a very damaging and false impression. I’d hope the reporters [would] go back and try to figure out what went wrong.” Siewert is less critical of the Bush administration’s role in the scandal, saying that “it’s hard to put any blame on the administration.” Siewert also declines to lay blame on Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, “especially,” Siewert says, “if the guidance he got on the story was wrong” (see May 22, 2001). Washington Post reporter Lloyd Grove, whose short report sparked the entire controversy (see January 23, 2001), says Fleischer is at the heart of the story. “The person who really needs to explain what he was doing was Ari, why he let the story percolate, and why he juiced it with his coy responses,” Grove says. “I think it’s a fair point to ask to what extent Mr. Fleischer’s credibility has been damaged by this.” Washington Post reporter Mike Allen, who contributed much of the Post’s reporting of the alleged vandalism (see January 26, 2001), says Fleischer’s allegation that Clinton staffers “cut [the] wires” of telephones and computers sparked so much coverage (see January 25, 2001). “That seems tough to ignore,” Allen says. Journalism professor Geneva Overholser pins much of the blame on the press: “We wouldn’t have had to go through all this if we had done our job right in the first place.” The media should have pressed harder for documentation and should not have allowed White House sources to remain anonymous, she says. “It’s just amazing what we let people get away with saying.” One White House reporter says that Fleischer did not have to do much more than start the story rolling. “We’re often such willing co-conspirators,” the reporter says. “They don’t have to hatch anything.” [Salon, 5/23/2001; American Journalism Review, 7/2001]

According to the trade publication PR Week, the ad hoc government public relations organization dubbed “The Rumsfeld Group” (see Late May 2001) is quite successful at sending what the publication calls “messaging advice” to the Pentagon. Marketing a Link between Iraq, Islamist Radicals - The group tells Pentagon PR chief Victoria Clarke and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that to get the American public’s support for the war on terror, and particularly the invasion of Iraq, they need to fix in the public mind a link between terror and nation-states, not just fluid and ad hoc groups such as al-Qaeda. Reporter Jeffrey St. Clair will write, “In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs.” The Rumsfeld Group comes up with the idea of labeling Iraq and certain other nations “rogue states,” an idea already extant in Rumsfeld’s mind, and the genesis of the so-called “axis of evil” (see January 29, 2002 and After January 29, 2002). Veterans of the Gulf War - The government allocates tens of millions of dollars, most of which is handed out to private public relations and media firms hired to spread the Bush administration’s message that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein must be taken out before he can use his arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons on US targets. Many of the PR and media executives are old friends of senior Bush officials, and many had worked on selling the 1991 Gulf War to the public (see October 10, 1990). Media Complicity Ensures Success - St. Clair will later note that while the PR efforts are, largely, failures with US allies, they are far more successful with the American population (see August 13, 2003). He will write: “A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction. Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions, and lies. Not about tactics or strategy or war plans. But about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam’s regime, but the American people.” St. Clair places as much blame on the “gullible [and] complicit press corps,” so easily managed by Clarke (see February 2003). “During the Vietnam war, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the US withdrawal,” St. Clair writes. “The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the US into a war that no one really wanted. What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally.” St. Clair notes the instance of one reporter on national television calling the US Army “our protectors,” and NBC’s David Bloom’s on-air admission that he is willing to do “anything and everything they can ask of us.” [CounterPunch, 8/13/2003]

Anthony Weiner. [Source: Anthony Weiner]A Democratic House member and four former Clinton administration staff members demand an apology from President Bush over the disproven Clinton “vandal scandal” stories from January 2001 (see January 25, 2001 and January 26, 2001). Two weeks ago, the General Services Administration (GSA) released a report debunking the stories (see May 18, 2001). In response, the White House leaks a hastily compiled “list” of damages that Bush staffers allege was done during the transition period (see June 2-3, 2001). Demand for Apology - Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) is joined by former White House officials Rob Housman, Jeff Gulko, Bridger McGaw, and Matthew Donoghue in demanding that Bush apologize for besmirching Clinton officials’ reputations with the false allegations. Weiner calls White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who was at the center of much of the rumors, “shameless,” and adds, “A GAO [General Accounting Office] study has confirmed there was no destruction of keyboards, no graffiti, there was no vandalism.” (The GAO found that because the White House had no records of the damages, it could not begin an investigation of the charges.) Semi-Denial - Fleischer’s deputy, Scott McClellan, notes that “there is no actual GAO ‘report,’ which the congressman refers to in his letter. There’s just a letter from GAO.” McClellan’s odd denial is, according to some Bush officials, an attempt to imply that there was actual damage done by Clinton staffers, but the Bush White House chose not to participate in the GAO’s proposed investigation because it wanted to “move forward” and keep a “positive tone.” One White House aide says: “We never kept a list of all the incidents, and therefore did not have anything to turn over. That doesn’t mean the incidents didn’t happen. We just were pleased to let the matter fade so that people could return to the focus on policy.” Response to Semi-Denial - Weiner says that the Bush White House claims are disingenuous. “I believe that the responsibility for this largely lies with the White House,” he says. “They fed this story, they nurtured this story, they spread this story.” The “vandal scandal” story was, Weiner says, part of a “strategy by the nascent Bush administration to toss up as much dust and smoke about the Clinton administration to give themselves a soft landing. It makes good copy to say ‘Well, there’s a new sheriff in town, and we don’t vandalize offices.’ Well, neither did the preceding administration.” Clinton staffers were made into “cannon fodder” for Bush administration propaganda, Weiner says. Donoghue calls the tales “a uniquely Capitol punishment, and that is the besmirching of our reputations. Standing here, all I can think of is what Ray Donovan said years ago, which is ‘Where do I go to get my reputation back?’ And that’s why we’re here today.” (Donovan is a former Reagan administration Cabinet official acquitted of bribery charges in 1987.) Donoghue says that he, McGaw, and Gulko have had problems finding jobs after their White House stints in part because of the vandalism allegations. [Salon, 6/2/2001]

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